"Everybody in the city knows them," Eve replied. "I just take the time to talk to some of them." She smiled wryly. "I guess I sort of think of myself as their voice on the council- Lord knows they don't have another one, and if I don't stick up for them, no one will."
"So have you ever run into someone named Scratch?"
Eve shook her head. "I don't think so. Who is he?"
"The man Al Kelly said led my son down into the subway," he said.
"I suspect he's no more real than anything else Al Kelly told you he saw." She glanced at her watch, finished her merlot, and stood up. "I don't have any way of knowing whether your son was guilty or not, but I think I can understand how much you're hurting right now. So let me talk to a couple of people, and at least maybe we can find out if anyone else has ever heard of this ‘Scratch' person. Call me tomorrow?"
Keith stood up. "Are you saying you believe me? That Jeff might be alive?"
"It doesn't matter what I believe," Eve said. "It's what you believe that's making you hurt. The only way you're going to stop hurting is by knowing for sure."
Then she was gone.
None of the men spoke; they didn't have to.
They all knew why they were there, what they had to do, what they were going to do…
Silently, they stripped off the clothes they'd worn when they arrived, then just as silently began pulling on the clothes they would wear for the evening's adventure. First came the socks and gloves. The socks were thick to keep their feet warm inside the thin and flexible shoes they would wear. The gloves were thin, to allow their fingers maximum flexibility.
Both the socks and gloves were black.
Next came the insulated nylon coveralls, so the men would be protected against the chill of the tunnel.
Then the shoes and the smudges of makeup, as black as the gloves and the coveralls.
Only when they were completely dressed, when every inch of their skin was covered in a dull and nonreflective black material, did they begin equipping themselves.
Each of them carried a knife, strapped to the lower leg, where it could be easily reached from a crouch.
Most of the guns were Steyr Mannlichers, SSG-PI models, chosen for their combination of accuracy, a short barrel, and the option to add either a flash hider or a suppressor. Fully loaded and equipped with second generation rifle scopes that could take advantage of any available light or provide their own infrared illumination, the guns still weighed barely ten pounds.
A couple of the hunters carried far less complicated but usually just as effective M-14A1s, the favored sniper rifle of the Marines.
For communication, they carried Ericsson-GE two-way radios, though by now they rarely needed them.
As silently as he'd dressed, each man now nodded an acknowledgment that he was ready.
Only then did the leader-who looked no different from the others-unlock the heavy door set into the room's back wall. He swung the door open and stepped to one side. "I am Hawk," he said. Then, as each man passed, he whispered a code name. Tonight, all the names happened to be avian.
"Eagle."
"Falcon."
"Osprey."
"Harrier."
"Kite."
Beyond the heavy door, which the leader closed and locked behind him, was a wide tunnel filled with steam pipes. Dim lights-bare bulbs protected by heavy metal grilles-cast pools of illumination every hundred feet, and even the areas between the bulbs weren't quite dark. "Level Four, Second Sector," the leader said. "Teams of two. Eagle and Osprey. Falcon and Harrier. Kite with me."
The men quickly set off toward the north, darting from one shadowy area to the next, scurrying through the pools of light like cockroaches escaping into the shelter of darkness. Soon, they turned toward the west, and now the tunnel was narrower, its ceiling lower, its lights more distantly spaced. The men, though, were almost as familiar with the tunnels beneath the streets as they were with the streets themselves, and they slowed not at all as they moved deeper and deeper into the maze. So far they hadn't needed to speak at all, for each of them knew exactly where they were. The real challenge wouldn't come for another half hour, when they descended to a level none of them had visited before.
With luck, one member of the party would bag the trophy tonight.
More likely, tonight would be nothing more than reconnaissance, as it usually was whenever they began the exploration of a new territory. The teams would split up, each team mapping the passages they explored, searching the byways and shafts, familiarizing themselves with the terrain.
For many, the reconnaissance was nearly as satisfying as the bagging of the trophy itself, although in the end the kill would always be the ultimate prize.
So how the fuck do we get out of here?"
Jeff could hear the fear behind Jagger's angry words-the same fear that had been burning away his own sense of hope.
Up!
That's all they had to do-get up to the surface. But as he tried to remember how he'd arrived at the airless room in the first place, tried to recall the twists and turns as he'd been led through the tunnels under the city, he realized it was impossible. He had no idea where they might be-no idea of how far he'd come from the subway station. Jagger had said they brought him down from the hospital, which Jeff assumed was Bellevue, but who knew how far from the hospital Jagger might have been taken?
What's more, he had no idea how deep beneath the city they might be.
Since the shot-and the scream that immediately followed it-had dictated the direction of their initial flight, they'd kept moving straight ahead. The tunnel, just tall enough so Jeff could walk upright, seemed to have been hacked out of the native rock itself. Pipes ran along the floor, large pipes that Jeff was certain were water mains. He was also fairly certain that they must be moving either north or south, under one of the avenues.
Not Park-the commuter trains from Grand Central ran under Park.
Unless they were south of the station. The trains to the suburbs all ran north, didn't they? He wracked his brain, trying to remember. But there were so many trains running in and out of the city all day-not just from Grand Central, but from Penn Station as well.
And the subways.
How many were there?
Dozens.
And aside from the subway tunnels, how many others were there under the city?
Hundreds.
A dim memory came back to him, of a class he'd taken last fall. It seemed like another life-had been another life. Evenings with Heather Randall in his tiny apartment on 109th Street, just west of Broadway. A life that now seemed so far removed that even the memories seemed to belong to someone else. But then the memory of the class-a semester on urban infrastructure-came into sharper focus, and he could almost hear the professor's voice.
"No one really knows what's under the streets of Manhattan anymore. A lot of people know parts of it-there are maps of the water system, maps of the gas mains, and maps of the trains and the subway systems and the electrical grid. But there is no map of all of it."
As they'd followed the flashlight beam, which already seemed to be weakening, Jeff had tried to keep his eyes trained upward, looking for a shaft that would take them to the surface.
Now they'd found one. Directly above his head rose a narrow shaft with a rusting ladder anchored in rotting concrete.
"One of us goes up that shaft and sees where it leads," he said.
Jagger shook his head. "I ain't goin‘. Could be anything up there."
"So what do you want to do, just keep walking? We're going to have to go up sooner or later."
Jagger peered up at the hole. "Doesn't look like it goes anywhere."
"It's got to go somewhere-if it doesn't, then why's it there?" He reached up and grasped the lowest rung of the ladder. "Give me a boost." As if he weighed no more than a child, Jagger raised him up until he was high enough to get a foot onto the bottom rung. "Shut off your light," he said as he switched on his own. "No use wasting the batteries."