He ran down his stairs two at a time and went straight for the kitchen. Here, he gathered food: bottled water, Dr Pepper, MoonPies, trail mix, an unopened block of cheese from the fridge, and a bag of tortilla chips. He didn’t have time to be choosy — he just grabbed whatever was at the back of the cabinets and unlikely to be missed.
Then he raced back upstairs to the master bedroom. He took a set of clean clothes from his drawers — black jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black hoodie, clothes that would be hard to see in the tunnels. He threw everything into the passageway and went back to his bathroom. Two minutes. He stripped off his clothes, but didn’t put them in the hamper — the smell might get noticed.
Instead, he wet a washcloth with cold water — no time to warm it up — and took the fastest sponge bath in history. Then he brushed his teeth, opening a new toothbrush and taking that and the toothpaste with him. He dried everything off with a towel and took the dirty washcloth, towel, and wet soap with him, opening a new one and leaving it in its place.
He grabbed gauze and ointment for his ankle, and had just bent to look at it when his alarm beeped. Time’s up.
He made it back to the bookcase with five seconds to spare, but even so, he heard steps on his front porch. A short round for Abbott and Costello.
He climbed into the tunnel, closed the bookcase door, and realized that he hadn’t had time to dress. Stifling a curse, he fumbled around in the dark for his clean clothes. He hadn’t checked the bookcase to see if light leaked through, so he couldn’t turn on his flashlight.
It took longer than it should have, and he was thoroughly chilled by the time he was done, but eventually he was dressed in his new clothes and Andres’s long coat. He packed everything he’d taken from the house into his old hoodie and dragged it down to the stone door that opened onto the tunnel.
He turned on his flashlight and studied his scraped ankle. It looked worse than he’d expected. He didn’t like the way that the skin around the wound was red and hot to the touch. The wound itself was deeper than he’d thought, and rust flakes were embedded in it. Clenching his jaw against the pain, he scrubbed the flakes out with the wet washcloth. He covered the throbbing wound carefully with ointment and wrapped the gauze around his ankle, wishing that he’d had a better first aid kit with him when Edison was shot. Then he leaned his back against the wall, hoping that the pain would subside and that the ointment would be enough to fight off infection.
Eventually, he gave up on the pain going away and had an impromptu dinner, repacked his backpack, and settled down for the night.
His ankle throbbed, the rocks were rough, and it was cold. Andres’s coat gave him a little protection, but it was still uncomfortable. He missed Edison’s warm body and steady presence. Hopefully, the dog was OK. Hopefully, he was out of the vet’s office with a couple of stitches and was eating steak at the foot of Celeste’s bed.
With or without Edison, he had one more clue to follow up. When Saddiq had spotted him in the tunnel just after he’d left the crime scene, he’d had asked if Rebar had given him documents. That meant that the documents were important, and Saddiq didn’t have them.
Joe shifted the old hoodie into a more comfortable position as his pillow and stared into the dark.
Rebar hadn’t given those documents to Joe as Saddiq had assumed. But Rebar had possessed them — Joe had seen them in his pockets when he’d been breaking the hole into the wall.
If those documents had disappeared by the time he’d been killed, Rebar had hidden them himself. He hadn’t had much time, so they must be close to the bricked-in presidential train car. If Rebar had hidden them in the car or the room itself, the police would have found them, and they would, presumably, have pointed to other suspects in Rebar’s death besides Joe. That meant that they had been hidden somewhere else.
In the tunnels.
Joe pulled Andres’s coat up under his chin. Tomorrow, he would find those papers.
Maybe they held the key to set him free.
Chapter 36
Ozan eased the window latch to the side with his knife. He’d disabled the motion sensor on it a long time ago.
“Ozan?” asked a soft voice from inside the room.
“Just me,” Ozan whispered. “Remember, it’s our secret.”
He lifted the window and climbed through it, careful to close and latch it from this side. Sometimes the staff did late-night bed checks and also checked the windows. He could hide under the bed when they came, but he didn’t want them to see an open latch. If they asked Erol about it, he’d tell them the truth.
A few seconds later, he stood next to his brother’s bed, looking down at the peaceful manatees on his bedspread. Slow, fat, and happy, they munched through an endless sea of blue. He bet they never got headaches.
“You came to tell me a story?” Erol tucked the blanket under his armpits.
“I did.” Ozan sat on the edge of the bed.
In a voice hardly louder than a whisper, he told Erol the story of The Rainbow Fish. He’d never particularly liked it. It was wrong that the fish had to slice scales off its own body and give them away to make friends. But Erol loved the story, so he told it to him every time he visited. Erol was asleep again before he got to the end, so he stopped telling it, leaving the fish with most of its shiny scales intact.
Ozan wished that he could have told his brother about his day — his good kill of the tennis instructor, his fruitless pursuit of the computer genius and his dog, how he’d finally gone back aboveground to shower and shave and nap. How a quick nap had restored most of his strength.
Whatever bug he’d been fighting off, he’d conquered it. Maybe that sweat bath had been good for something. Or maybe it was just getting solid sleep. Either way, he felt like his old self again.
Once he’d gotten cleaned up and fresh, he’d contacted an old friend with the CIA, Rash Connelly, and told him what he knew about Tesla and Subject 523. Dr. Dubois had links into the CIA, so Rash probably knew most of this stuff anyway. What he didn’t know, he’d keep to himself.
“Why didn’t you get this Tesla after you killed 523?” Rash asked.
“Not my orders.” Ozan didn’t mention that he’d failed to kill Joe twice, or that he’d taken out the kid in front of the station.
“The police say that the tennis player was killed by a professional, but they won’t give us the name.”
Ozan counted to three, thinking it over. “That was me. New orders. I thought the kid was my target — he looked like the guy, he was wearing the guy’s company clothes, and he had the guy’s dog. It was an accident.”
Rash sat silent on the other end, probably trying to decide how much sympathy to have for the accident. He must have decided that the tennis instructor wasn’t worth fighting over, because he said, “Why are you calling me now?”
“I want on the team. I want to bring Tesla down.”
“That’s unorthodox.”
“I’m on the job regardless.” Ozan let him think that those orders came from Dr. Dubois. “And I think it’ll be easier for everyone else if I’m in the loop. It’ll keep accidents from happening.”
Rash had hesitated again, longer this time. “I’ll see what I can do.”
It turned out that he could do a lot. He’d called Ozan back during dinner to tell him that he was officially on board. The CIA’s orders were not to apprehend Tesla — they were to kill him. He was considered armed and dangerous, having killed two civilians and maybe a cop, and was believed to be in possession of sensitive classified information.