'Step out of the room and turn to your left,' Malcolm Fletcher said. 'At the end of the hallway, you'll see a stairwell.'
Darby saw the stairs. They led only one way: down.
'Don't worry about the stairs or the landings,' Fletcher said. 'They're secure.'
Darby moved the beam of her tactical light around the cold, empty rooms. 'What happened to Jennifer Sanders?'
'Ask her yourself,' Fletcher said. 'She's waiting for you downstairs.'
'I know you're in here. I know you're watching me right now.'
Fletcher didn't answer.
'I'm alone,' Darby said. 'Show yourself. We'll go downstairs together.'
'I'm afraid you'll have to endure this journey alone.'
'I'm not going anywhere until you tell me your agenda.'
'I thought you wanted to know the truth.'
'Then tell me.'
'Telling you the truth doesn't carry the same impact as discovering it for yourself.'
'Tell me where you found the statue.'
'The historian Ian Kershaw said the road to Auschwitz was paved with indifference,' Fletcher said. 'It's time for you to choose. You need to make your decision now.'
Darby looked back to the stairs, thinking of Emma Hale and Judith Chen. She thought about Hannah Givens. She wondered if the answer to Jennifer Sanders' disappearance was, in fact, waiting somewhere below her.
She thought of Jennifer's mother clutching the crucifix tucked underneath the cellophane wrapper of her cigarettes and took the first step.
Descending into the awful dark, Darby was aware of her physical senses – the hollow feeling in her legs; the sweat collecting underneath her arms and hardhat; the way her footsteps echoed and thumped along with the rapid beating of her heart.
'How are you feeling?'
'Nervous,' Darby said. 'Scared.'
'Are you claustrophobic?'
'I don't think so. Why?'
'You'll see in a moment.'
Darby reached the bottom floor. She saw the steel door marked 'ward 8'. She hadn't searched this area over the weekend because it was locked. Reed had said the area was too unstable and refused to let anyone through, forcing the search teams to find alternate routes.
A padlock was lying on the floor. The lock had been sawed off.
'I'm here.'
'Open the door,' Fletcher said.
The corridors went straight ahead, to her left and right. They were narrow and pitch black and in the thin beam of her flashlight they seemed to stretch for miles.
'Your destination is straight ahead,' Fletcher said. 'When you reach the end of the corridor, turn left and travel halfway down the next hallway until you see a maintenance door.'
Exposed pipes ran along the walls, near the ceiling. Almost every door was shut. The floors were frozen with ice. Darby heard a humming sound and then realized it was her blood pounding against her ear drums.
The cold darkness pressing against her, she made her way down the main corridor, the ice slippery beneath her boots. She remembered a line from Dante, how hell wasn't burning with fire but rather a place where Satan was frozen in a lake of ice.
Darby turned left into another maze of corridors. On a wall of chipped white and blue paint was faded lettering with arrows pointing to the different locations inside the hospital. The frigid air smelled of dank pipes and mildew. She moved into the corridor, listening for sound and watching for movement.
Ten minutes later, she found the door marked 'MAINTENANCE'.
'I found the door,' Darby said.
Malcolm Fletcher didn't answer.
'Hello?'
No answer.
Darby checked the phone. The signal had dropped. She was too far underground.
She placed the phone on the floor. Leaning against the door, she pressed down on the handle with her elbow and pushed it open.
50
The maintenance room was empty.
Darby tucked the phone in her pocket. The room was a closet and held nothing but rusted shelves. The middle and bottom shelves were empty, but the top shelf held rusted tools, metal pails and old bags of cement. Under the centre bottom shelf and lying against the wall was a large metal ventilation grille, the kind used to heat and cool large buildings.
Darby got down on one knee and shined the thin beam of light against the grate. Beyond it was a vent about thirty feet long; it curved off to the left. Standing at the end of the vent was a small statue of the Virgin Mary.
There was no way Malcolm Fletcher had crawled through the vent. The man was too big, too wide to fit through this narrow space.
Are you claustrophobic? Fletcher had asked.
Was Fletcher waiting for her on the other side? Or had he led her here to find something?
Darby checked her phone. No signal. She could backtrack, locate a signal and call Bryson; or she could crawl through the vent now.
She saw the Blessed Mother's sorrowful expression in the beam of her flashlight. Darby removed the tactical light and holstered her SIG. She rolled her flashlight across the vent, then got down on her stomach and crawled inside. Malcolm Fletcher waded through the knee-deep snow on the western part of Sinclair's campus. His Jaguar was strategically parked behind a grouping of dumpsters, safely out of view – at least for the moment.
His years of living on the run had taught him the importance of carrying only minimal possessions. A small suitcase held his clothes. His briefcase held the more important items – surveillance gear, listening devices, and GPS units. The false passports were practically worthless. Since 9-11, Interpol had stepped up its restrictions at airports.
Fletcher popped the trunk. He tucked his FBI badge and supporting credentials in his suit jacket pocket. He had already procured a new sidearm, a 9mm Glock, courtesy of a Roxbury gang-banger who suddenly became very eager to unload his illegal firearm after his wrist and nose were broken. Fletcher took the other items he needed and shut the trunk.
A laptop sat on the front seat. The padded cone of the headphone pressed against one ear, he typed on the laptop to activate the remote transmitters he had strategically placed inside the lower level. He heard the sound of a young woman's laboured breathing and the clang of metal. Darby McCormick was crawling through the heating vent.
So close, he thought, grinning.
Malcolm Fletcher started the car. Cecil's soft, haunting piano music played over the speakers as he drove away. Tim Bryson sat in the cramped passenger seat of a Honda Civic parked at a Mobil gas station on Route One. His partner, Cliff Watts, stood outside, smoking.
Bryson had picked the location in case he needed to move to the hospital. If there was a problem, he could be at the front doors in less than three minutes.
For the past hour he had talked to Bill Jordan. His men had reported that Fletcher had left a cell phone inside the patient rooms. He had called Darby on this phone, so there was no way to listen in on the conversation.
The two undercover detectives watched Darby descend the stairs. Several minutes later they followed and found the sawed-off padlock on the floor.
Beyond the door was a maze of corridors. The last report was that they still hadn't found her.
Another troubling note: the panic button with its GPS unit was no longer transmitting. Jordan had lost her signal.
Darby was too far underground, Jordan said. He had sent her a text message asking her to check in but she still hadn't responded. Given her location, it was possible that she hadn't received the message. Jordan still couldn't hail either of his men.
Bryson's phone rang.
'Still no word from Darby,' Jordan said.
'Give her some time.'
'I don't like her wandering down there alone without knowing what's going on. We should move some more people inside.'
'And if Fletcher is watching, he'll see them and bolt.'
'Or he could be inside the basement with her,' Jordan said. 'We've already mapped out the terrain. The building plans are shit – half the passages are either sealed off with rubble or locked. The place is a goddamn maze, but we managed to find a way to the basement level. I can have them there in half an hour – Wait, hold on.'