When he reached five hundred and twenty three (brown, blue, red), he stopped. There was nothing obvious here, but just ahead was a dark mound. He hurried over. The track had been ripped up beyond this point, and the ties had been piled in an untidy stack. It was the perfect place to hide something. Who would ever think to look here?
Joe would.
He looked back down the tunnel for a trace of moving light, like from a flashlight, but saw nothing. It was as safe as it was going to get. He tipped up the goggles and risked using his flashlight. Several minutes of careful digging, which was louder than he would have liked, produced a flat briefcase. It had been fine leather once, but now the surface was cracked. The hinges were broken and someone, probably Rebar, had tied it together with a belt.
Joe tucked it into his backpack. He itched to open it, but it wasn’t safe here. The police patrolling the tunnels might be back at any second. They might have heard the noise that he’d made moving the train ties and be on their way to him right now. He had to get to a safe place.
He turned off his flashlight, put on the goggles, and jogged back the way he’d come, wishing that a tunnel branched off, but none did. He reached the brick room without incident, but when he looked off to the side, he saw a couple of men heading across the wide tunnel where the tracks converged — where he liked to play fetch with Edison.
He ducked back inside the dark tunnel and waited.
The men got so close that he could hear them talking. Not exactly stealthy.
“How are we supposed to find him? There’s miles of tunnels down here, assuming he didn’t just get on a private helicopter and fly to Canada,” said a man with a gravelly voice. He sounded as if it had taken fifty years of smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky to perfect that growl.
“He’s a nut,” the other man said. “Can’t go outside, my ass.”
“I bet he could if he was properly motivated, like by having the whole damn tunnel system crawling with cops.”
Joe wished that were true.
Their voices grew louder. Joe shrank back against the tunnel wall. He didn’t dare retreat farther for fear of making a sound.
“I say leave him until we get another superstorm to wash him out,” said Gravel Voice. “My feet hurt.”
“He might’ve killed Officer Chin.”
“Or Chin might’ve fallen in front of that train.”
The other man grunted.
“Either way,” said Gravel Voice, “I say we shoot first, so we don’t have to chase him.”
“Amen to that, brother.”
The voices moved closer. Joe held his breath. If they saw him, he wouldn’t be able to get away. He was trapped.
Chapter 38
Vivian gave up on sleep. She’d dozed a little in Tesla’s bedroom, after insisting on sleeping on his bed, but too shy to do more than lie down on top of the quilt. She didn’t know exactly where his bolt-hole was, but it was up here somewhere. She’d prowled around, but one or the other of the cops had shadowed her every move, and she didn’t want them around when she found the secret door.
Eventually, she’d told them that she was going to bed, and they’d reluctantly left her alone. When the men had done their hourly patrols, she’d searched the house for Tesla’s bolt-hole, but she hadn’t found it. She’d also found no evidence that Tesla had come back into the house, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that he had. He needed food. He needed Wi-Fi. And she’d noticed that the cops left the house together every hour for about five minutes. If she were Tesla, she’d sneak in during that time and gather whatever she needed from inside.
She looked up at the plastered ceiling above Tesla’s bed. The plasterer had done an excellent job — the ceiling was perfectly smooth, coved at the edges. A hairline crack ran along one corner, probably from the house shifting when the trains went by. All in all, the house was solid, the kind she’d only read about in books.
She fingered the antique quilt. Her mother would have loved it — tiny stitches formed intricate patterns. The seamstress had spent a long time getting it just right. The quilt and sheets smelled like lilac. Where had Tesla found a lilac-scented detergent? It fit the room perfectly.
The agents downstairs, and they were agents, not police, closed the front door. Time for another circuit of the tunnels. She didn’t think that Joe would come in that way. He’d come in through the entrance he’d escaped out of, wherever it was.
She’d lied when she told them that Joe had slipped down the right-hand tunnel when he’d seen that the elevator was coming down, leaving her behind to answer questions. He had been under her protection at the time, so she’d felt obligated. If they caught him and charged him, her deceit might come to light.
If they caught him? When they caught him. She’d heard that today they were going to start searching the tunnels in a grid pattern with trained bloodhounds. Even with hundreds of miles of tunnels to hide in, Tesla wouldn’t be able to avoid them forever.
She sat up in bed, ran her fingers through her hair. She might as well look for him again. She’d do a round of the station, especially the restaurants, looking for the dog. She wished that she had the easy, and illegal, access to the surveillance footage that Tesla so obviously enjoyed. She’d have been able to monitor him from the comfort of her own home — or his.
As much as she’d been taken aback by the house when she first saw it, it had started to grow on her. She could see why he liked living in the sumptuous antique quarters completely isolated from the noise and bustle of the city above. His bedroom was bigger than her whole apartment and, she hated to admit it, it smelled better, too.
First stop, coffee. Then breakfast and a quick pass of the Wi-Fi stations in Grand Central. After that, she’d see if she could talk her way into searching the tunnels around Platform 36 on her own. She hadn’t managed to last night, but there would be a new officer on duty, and that would give her a second chance. If not, she’d come back here and poke around. He was close. She knew he was.
She’d use the syringe first and ask questions later. Joe might hate her for knocking him out, but if she could get him out of these tunnels safely, she’d take the heat.
Chapter 39
Joe leaned back against the cold steel pillar and made himself a blanket tent. It smelled like dog. In the yellow dog’s absence, he found it comforting. He’d dodged patrols for the past few hours. After he’d almost been caught near the brick room, he’d tried heading for home where he could have examined the contents of the briefcase in peace, but there were too many people in his way. Men with dogs.
He didn’t know if he’d ever make it back.
Trying not to think about it, he turned on his flashlight and finally unbelted the old briefcase. Slowly, he lifted off the top to reveal yellowed papers, some handwritten, some typewritten.
Gently, he lifted out the first sheaf of pages. The handwritten ones were impossible to decipher. He tried to read the unusual script, but it appeared not to be English to begin with. Maybe German, but he couldn’t be sure of that. He wasn’t even sure about the individual letters.
Anchoring the blanket tent under his feet, he made space to sort the contents. He set aside the handwritten pages, finding beneath them a slender typewritten report, in English, dated November 1949. That made it almost sixty-five years old.
He began to read:
Prepared for CIA Project Bluebird: Mind Control Through Parasitic Infection