The Bricklayer - Boyd Noah - Страница 5

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“Just make sure they don’t get me burned. That note sounds like these people would be just as happy if we screwed this up.” He pulled the transmitter mike off his chest and packed everything into the watertight bag. As he stepped into the water, he took another deep breath and said, “Well, tough guy, this is what you wanted.”

The water was cold, but the biggest problem was swimming underwater with the twenty-two-pound bag of fake money. The weight kept him deeper than he wanted to be. Some of the time he had to drag it along the bottom while keeping his eye on the compass. And the strange configuration of the harness webbing that was cutting into his waist and shoulders wasn’t helping. Halfway across, the tide started coming back in and the current began picking up. It took him more than a half hour to get across the river.

As he got closer to the other side, he could see more luminescent green light. He felt the river bottom sloping up, so he set the bag down on it. Keeping a foot through the carrying straps, he surfaced to confirm his location. He was close to the prison now. Maybe too close. It looked black in its own shadow. And silent, making him want to hold his breath as if the building were a wounded animal he had stumbled across, its only means of attack to lure in those who believed it was dead. The structure was no longer two-dimensional, but seemed to wrap around the end of the island, and at the same time around him. Its west end had wings that ran north and south for hundreds of additional feet and at its tallest point was at least six stories high. So much for making the drop and leaving everything else to the surveillance agents. It looked like he was on his own.

He dove down and gripped the bag and saw that the green lights were a couple of glowsticks that had been attached to the underwater wall of the castle. When he got within a couple of feet, he snapped on the flashlight and could see the sticks had been laced through the remains of a metal grid-work that had once secured some type of conduit, possibly sewage, since the prison had been built when the country’s rivers were considered nature’s refuse solution. The underwater passageway was narrow, but he could fit through it. Taking a deep breath, he pushed the moneybag into the opening and followed it in.

A few minutes later he broke through the surface and found himself standing in a large stone room, the floor of which was bedrock except for the large rectangular access opening that he was now standing in. There were watermarks on the walls that indicated seawater filled the room to three-quarters at high tide. Toward the top of one wall were three heavy metal rings anchored into the stone and concrete, the kind that prisoners might have been chained to. He wondered if the U.S. Navy of a hundred years ago hadn’t used the room for “retraining,” taking the most uncooperative prisoners to the subterranean cell for an obedience lesson taught by two high tides a day and the flesh-nibbling crabs that rode in on them.

Pulling off the fins and mask, West shrugged out of the scuba tank and took out the snubnose. After turning on the transmitter, he spoke into the mike: “Any unit on this channel, can you hear me?” Because of the hundreds of tons of steel and concrete surrounding him, it would have been a miracle to get any reception. “Anyone hear me?” he tried once more. The only response was the hollow silence of the cavernous cell.

There didn’t appear to be a way out of the room, but then he noticed a trapdoor in the ceiling above the far wall. The height of the room was a good ten feet. How was he supposed to get up there?

He walked over to the wall directly underneath the trapdoor and shined his light up for a closer look. Just beneath it was a thick, rusty L-shaped hook embedded in the wall. In shoes, he could just touch a basketball rim if he jumped, ten feet. Barefooted, he could probably get up to the hook, but it didn’t look like there was enough of it exposed for him to hold on to. He flashed the light around the room for anything that might help him reach it, but there was nothing except what he had brought with him.

Then it hit him—the webbing on the tank. That’s why it was so long. The extortionists had used an excess of nylon strapping to rig the tank so he could extricate himself from this cell. It was some sort of test that they hoped the FBI would fail.

After stripping the strap out of the tank’s frame, he quickly measured it using the nose-to-fingertip method. It was three lengths, about nine feet long. Great, he thought, nine feet to get me up ten feet and through the trapdoor. And with the moneybag. He let his sailor’s knowledge of knots run through his mind for a while before the answer came to him.

He laid the scuba tank against the wall, and because it was round, he jammed the two wedge-shaped fins underneath it to prevent it from rolling out as he stood on it, getting him a foot closer to the hook. After knotting a simple loop in the middle of the strap, he tied a large slipknot at one end and threw it over the hook. Pulling it down slowly, he tied the moneybag tightly at the bottom end of the webbing.

As West started climbing, he realized how much the swim had taken out of him physically. He began to wonder if part of the Pentad’s plan was to exhaust him. If it was, that meant a face-to-face confrontation could lie somewhere on the other side of the trapdoor.

Once he could stand in the knotted loop, he was able to straighten up and, with a full shove, push up on the door, causing it to rotate 180 degrees and slam against the floor in which it was hinged. West waited and listened. Still there was only silence.

The room he was climbing into was pitch black. He pulled himself up, drew his weapon, and got into a crouched firing position before turning on his light. It was some sort of holding room in a cellblock, about twenty feet by twenty feet. White paint was peeling off all the walls, and he could now smell it in the salty, damp air. Knowing how old the facility was and what the navy used for paint thirty years earlier, he was sure it was lead-based. An old dry-rotted ladder lay flat on the floor next to the trapdoor.

There was only one door in the room and he walked to it, turning off his light before opening it. He tried to do it carefully, but its rusted hinges echoed shrilly ahead of him. It opened to a narrow corridor. A hundred years ago the navy probably figured that whether on sea or land, a sailor needed only minimal width to move from compartment to compartment, so why waste money on aesthetics. At the far end of the corridor, he could see three more glowsticks fastened to a heavy stairwell door that had a small window of wired glass embedded in it. The sticks were shaped into an arrow pointing up. He went back to the trapdoor and pulled the moneybag up.

If he was going higher, maybe the transmitter would eventually work. He taped it to the small of his back and ran the mike up onto his chest, taping it in place. Then he put on his shirt to hide it. Jamming everything else into the bag, he headed for the glowstick arrow.

The stairwell was even narrower than the corridor. A metal railing ascended alongside the stairs. Peeling paint lined the deck and he could feel some of it sticking to the bottom of his feet. West turned off his flashlight. Of course they knew he was coming, but they didn’t need to know exactly where he was. In the dark he put his hand on the railing and started up. There was a landing between each floor, and he stopped on each one, snapping on his light to check the next set of stairs. Then he turned it off and listened for a few moments. He heard nothing, though he knew they were there. He continued on up the stairs.

On each floor he checked the metal door to determine if it was where he was supposed to enter the prison, but they were all locked. The window in each had been covered with paper on the opposite side so he couldn’t look through.

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