Chapter 5 - The Ambush at Worth Street
The light came first not as white, but as a dirty, sulfurous orange that filtered through the iron grating of a sidewalk coal hole sixty feet above them.
They were under Worth Street, where the old pneumatic mail tubes ran parallel to the water mains. Here, the tunnel had been patched with corrugated steel during the construction of the subway in the 1930s, and the air had the metallic, burnt-sugar taste of third-rail arcing from the Lexington Avenue line four blocks away.
Wren stopped.
She didn't raise a hand. She merely ceased to exist as a moving object, her body dropping six inches into an instinctive, three-point crouch that put her ear within two inches of the damp brick invert.
Adrian halted immediately. Marco, five paces back, pulled the shotgun from the garbage bag with a dry, crinkling sound that sounded like thunder in the narrow tunnel.
"What is it?" Adrian breathed.
"Pumps," she said.
"Sump pumps?"
"No," she said. "Portable two-stroke gasoline engines. On the street level. They’re running three of them. Listen to the exhaust."
Adrian listened. Through the six feet of earth and pavement above them came the faint, rhythmic chug-chug-chug of small internal combustion engines—the kind used by municipal utility crews to clear flooded manholes after an autumn gale.
"Department of Environmental Protection?" Marco whispered.
"No," Wren said. She lifted her head. Her nostrils flared slightly, testing the air moving through the conduit. "They aren't pumping water out. They’re pumping something in."
Adrian caught the scent half a second later.
It was not sewage. It was not city gas.
It was the sweet, heavy, cloying stench of industrial degreaser—chlorinated solvent, the kind used by the rail yards to strip heavy axle grease from the undercarriages of locomotives. It was dense, twice as heavy as air, and it was rolling down the incline of the Worth Street branch toward the cistern like a gray, invisible carpet.
"Arthur," Adrian said.
"He doesn't know we're here," Marco said. "He’s just flushing the line. He’s clearing every conduit within six blocks of the court so nothing can come up through the basements."
"He knows," Wren said.
She pointed to the wall three feet ahead.
A single fiber-optic line—no thicker than a piece of black thread—had been strung along the mortar line using plastic masonry clips that were still white, their manufacturing stamps clean and free of silt. Every ten yards, a tiny infrared emitter, no larger than an insect’s eye, blinked with a dull, cherry-red pulse that was invisible until the Maglite’s beam was turned sixty degrees off-axis.
"Trip-line," Adrian said. "We broke the beam forty yards back when we came through the sluice."
A sound came down through the iron vent above them—the sharp, metallic clack-clack of an iron pry-bar being jammed beneath the rim of a street-level manhole cover.
"Back," Adrian ordered.
"We can't go back," Marco said. "The solvent’s behind us. If we hit that cistern again, the vapor will take our lungs out in thirty seconds."
"Up," Wren said.
She was looking at a vertical run of notched iron rungs anchored into the brickwork, leading to an old service valve thirty feet above the invert. The rungs were orange with rust, their anchor bolts weeping long, reddish-brown stains that looked like dried arteries across the masonry.
"That leads to the sub-basement of the Criminal Courts building," she said. "The old boiler room. They haven't used it since they converted the complex to steam from the district plant in 1974."
"Is it locked?" Adrian asked.
"It’s not locked," she said. "It’s chained from the other side. But the chain is seventy years old."
Marco didn't wait. He slung the shotgun across his back, caught the bottom rung with both hands, and tested it with his full weight. The iron groaned, but held.
"I’ll take the point," Marco grunted. "Boss, you take her middle. If you drop, I can't catch you from above."
"Just climb," Adrian said.
The climb was four minutes of absolute, rhythmic agony. With every rung, the third and fourth ribs on Adrian’s right side ground together like two pieces of broken porcelain. He felt the first surgical clip give way—a tiny, sharp pop beneath his skin that was followed instantly by a warm, wet slide that reached his belt before he had climbed six feet.
He kept his eyes on the hem of Wren’s peacoat. She climbed like a spider—no wasted effort, her toes finding the tiny square flats of the iron rungs without slipping, her breathing so quiet Adrian couldn't hear it over the roar of his own pulse.
At the twenty-foot mark, the air became hot.
The solvent was pooling below them now; Adrian could hear it hissing as it hit the stagnant water in the invert, releasing clouds of heavy, anesthetic vapor that made the edges of his vision turn into a shimmering, oily kaleidoscope. His throat felt like he had swallowed sand.
"Marco," Adrian rasped.
"Almost there," the lieutenant called down. "The hatch is iron. It’s got an inch of asphalt over the top. Somebody paved over the street vent."
"The boiler room," Wren called up. "Not the street. Look left. There’s a cleanout door for the flue."
Marco swung his light. A four-foot square of cast iron, embossed with the name of the A.B. Farquhar Co., York, PA, 1898, was set into the brickwork three feet to the left of the ladder.
Marco reached out with his left boot, hooked his heel over the lower hinge, and kicked.
The sound was like an artillery shell hitting a bunker. The top hinge—eaten through by seventy years of coal-gas sulfur—sheared off with a high, singing ping. The door swung outward into a dark, cavernous space that smelled of dry soot and old concrete.
"Go," Marco said, catching Wren by the collar of her coat and swinging her through the opening as if she weighed no more than an empty knapsack.
Adrian reached the opening three seconds later. His right hand was completely numb; the nerve had been pinched between his clavicle and his first rib, leaving his fingers curled like dry claws. He couldn't get his knee onto the sill.
"Adrian," she said.
It was the first time she had used his name without the Mister.
Her hands—small, cold, and surprisingly hard—clamped around his wrist. She didn't have the leverage to pull a hundred and ninety pounds of bone and muscle, but she provided the anchor. She leaned her entire body back into the soot-filled darkness of the flue, her heels dug into the concrete floor, her teeth bared in an expression of such pure, feral ferocity that Adrian found his foot, found the iron rim, and lunged forward.
He hit the concrete on his left shoulder, rolling twice to clear the opening.
Marco tumbled in after him, dragging the cast-iron door shut with the heel of his boot and jamming the barrel of his shotgun through the handle to wedge it against the brick frame.
They were in the boiler room.
Above them, through eighty feet of vertical space, the faint, institutional hum of fluorescent lights and electric elevators filtered down through three layers of concrete floor.
Adrian lay on his back in the soot, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. His shirt was soaked from his armpit to his hip, the dark red spreading through the linen in a broad, ragged star.
Wren knelt beside him. She didn't look at his face. She pulled his coat open, used two fingers to tear the hem of her own clean wool sweater, and pressed the pad of cloth directly against the open puncture wound where the clip had pulled free.
The pain was so bright, so absolute, that Adrian's vision flashed from white to black and back to gray.
"You're losing too much," she said.
"We have... forty minutes," Adrian gasped. His teeth were slick with copper.
"You don't have forty minutes," she said. She leaned down until her face was three inches from his, her slate-gray eyes wide, clear, and completely devoid of fear. "You stay here with Marco. Give me the cylinder."
"No," Adrian said. He caught her forearm with his good hand, his fingers sinking into the wool. "If you walk in there alone... Arthur’s men will have you out the service door before the clerk can even look at the seal."
"They won't," she said.
"They will," Adrian whispered. "You don't know what they look like now. They don't look like men with pry-bars. They look like lawyers with briefcases and silver pens. They look like men who will ask you to sit down in a private room while they verify your credentials, and then you’ll never see a hallway again."
He sat up, his left arm shaking so violently Marco had to put a shoulder under his armpit to keep him from falling back into the ash.
"Marco," Adrian said.
"Yeah, boss."
"Take the service elevator to the fourth floor. Pull the master fire alarm for the north annex. That’ll drop the magnetic doors between the courtrooms and the public rotunda."
"And you?" Marco asked.
May you like
Adrian looked down at the girl. She was still holding the bloody rag against his side, her fingers red to the knuckles, her breath coming short and sharp through her nose.
"We’re going to the front door," Adrian said. "I paid ninety thousand dollars to have her cleaned up. I’m not going to let her walk into the surrogate’s office through the trash."
