"What about Kunkle?" Panatello asked.
"He went straight to the prison. He was seen scoping it out, including the beemer parked on the far side, and then he ducked inside." She checked her watch. "That was about twenty minutes ago. I've since assembled a multidepartmental tac team and parked them out of sight all around the place, on the water as well. There is blood, by the way, covering the car's backseat."
That introduced a pause in the conversation.
"And there's been nothing since?" Joe Gunther finally asked.
"Not a peep."
Gunther stepped away and absentmindedly watched the chopper crew through the window as they secured their craft to the helipad. Behind him, Scott and Panatello coordinated how to get to the prison without attracting undue attention.
"Worried about your people?"
Gunther turned at Ward Ogden's quiet, resonant voice.
"Willy especially," he admitted. "Mostly because of what he might do. I mean, Sam could be dead by now, which would damn near kill me, but Christ only knows about Willy. He's already in enough hot water-but that'll probably be nothing compared to what he comes up with next."
Ogden smiled enigmatically. "Water may not be that hot."
Gunther's eye narrowed. "Meaning what?"
"Panatello and I were talking during the flight. If he agrees to play along, Wild Willy might just duck this bullet-for the most part, at least. Roughing up Casey Ballantine'll need a closer look by the locals, but right now, from a legal standpoint, what he did in New York might not even surface."
"He shot Cashman, for God's sake."
Ogden shook his head. "Somebody did, but we don't have any evidence and Riley's not talking. Same thing with the assault on Budd Wilcox-he never saw who hit him-thought it was Cashman. And Lenny Manotti's never going to say he was pushed around by a one-armed man. Panatello's bunch are going to be busy enough without dragging Willy into it.
"And," he added, "the Casey Ballantine thing up here'll probably end up in the same place. She'll be way too busy trying to stay out of jail to be pointing fingers at Willy Kunkle."
The voices behind them rose up as people began crowding the exit. Ogden laid a hand on Gunther's shoulder. "I'm not saying I'm right, and I'm not saying it won't all be moot depending on how crazy he gets today, but if I were you, I wouldn't worry about his legal problems too much.
"Of course," he put in almost as an afterthought, "I'm also not sure I'd let him out of Vermont for ten to twenty years, either." The first floor of the Fortress looked like the aftermath of an earthquake. As Willy picked his way carefully through the debris left by the remodelers, he was impressed by both their ambitions and their destructiveness. Walls had been sledgehammered through, holes chopped into ceilings, and massive piles of glass block windows had been gathered where more conventional windows had replaced them. The logic of their plans was just barely discernible through the rubble, and he had to admit, what with the open spaces and the generous views, it did look like a potentially attractive workplace.
But it was also empty of any signs of life. If Liptak was here, he'd apparently tucked himself away inside the building's older, so-called Castle section.
Willy found a single door connecting the addition to the mother ship: a narrow hallway on the ground floor, a concrete tunnel with a gaping, open steel-barred gate, leading into a void so dark, he felt he was stepping into pure space.
His already cautious progress slowed to a tentative creeping, and he placed each foot carefully before the other, gently pushing aside any trash and rubble on the floor to avoid crunching it underfoot. He even opened his mouth to breathe so that he could better hear whatever might be awaiting him.
By the time he reached the end of the connecting tunnel, he was walking blind. He extracted from his pocket a small flashlight he always kept on hand, and, after listening carefully, held it as far away from himself as possible, in case it was used as a target, and switched it on.
What appeared before him was like a still from a black-and-white movie: a long, constricted, towering slit of a corridor, with a wall of boarded-up windows on one side and a stacked tier of rusty caged-in galleries on the other. Both the ceiling and the end of this long room extended beyond the reach of the tiny flashlight, and in the silence he could imagine the voices of thousands of confined men, their hands gripping the bars, or playing cards on the floor between cells. In the still dampness of the air, he could all but smell the sweat, the bland food, and the stink of hundreds of toilets. Willy had visited old, overcrowded prisons before, some almost as decrepit as this one, and knew too well what was missing from the picture now before him.
Satisfied that his light hadn't given him away, Willy took his bearings and found a staircase leading up, walled with more bars. Still moving gingerly, he climbed to the next level, which also took him to the building's west side. There, he came to a balcony inside the second-floor gallery, a row of cells on the right, and instead of a conventional railing to the left, a wall of open vertical bars as far as he could see. The same gloomy silence prevailed, but the sense of vastness was reduced. Now he felt truly entombed, wrapped up by darkness, silence, and aging steel. Everything was made of metal, from floor to overhead canopy, and from everything hung large flakes of peeling gray paint, making him feel he was brushing alongside an endless length of stretched-out alligator skin. As he walked as softly as possible across the debrisstrewn floor, past cell after devastated cell, each with its own rusty bedsprings, toilet, and sink, and each choked with the small, accumulated rubble of the ages, he felt himself being swallowed whole.
The trip felt interminable, but eventually he came to the end of the gallery, to another set of stairs, and finally to a passageway leading to the prison's central administrative area-the heart of the Castle proper.
There he found himself on a balcony with an ornate wrought-iron, mahogany-topped railing, overlooking an immense, three-story-high reception area with an enclosed section in the middle, much like a teller's cage, and several grand staircases more suitable to a Europeanstyle hotel. It was like stepping from Devil's Island into the lobby of the Ritz, albeit right after a bombing run.
Now he was at a loss. The mezzanine he was standing on split in two directions, surrounding the great hall below him, and he also had a choice between the stairs leading both up and down to the ground floor, all with nothing to indicate which direction to follow. Instinctively, he killed his small flashlight to help himself rely solely on his hearing.
A faint scraping sound drew his attention toward the northwest. Turning the light back on, he took the left branch.
This led him to another door, a second slightly smaller room with erstwhile offices lining the walls, and the first trickle of daylight presumably from an unboarded up window.
He pocketed his flashlight and replaced it with his gun. The scraping he'd just barely heard earlier was now loud, rhythmic, and definitely coming from one of the offices ahead.
Barely breathing at all now, Willy sidled up to the entrance, aware of the tiniest sound from beneath his shoes, and very slowly peered around the corner.
Sammie Martens, bound, gagged, and with a large bloodstain on her right leg, lay propped up against the wall, under the open window where the marks on the floor indicated she'd dragged herself with considerable effort, digging her heels into the floor and pushing again and again.
Willy swung rapidly into the room and crouched to one side of the door, his gun covering the area before him. The room was otherwise empty.