Dark Days (22 page)

“What's a cattle tunnel?” asked Natalie.

“Back before refrigeration they needed to bring the cattle from the boats on the river to the slaughterhouses in the Meat-packing District,” Liberty said. “They couldn't risk them stampeding down the streets of New York, so they drove them through underground tunnels made out of wood. They had cowboys and everything.”

“Are you being serious?” I asked.

“Totally,” he said. “When they stopped needing them, the tunnels were built over and people lost track of where they are.”

“That means this should take us out to the river if we go that way,” Alex said pointing to the left.

We all started that way but stopped a few moments later when we heard a squeaking noise coming toward us.

“I hope it's not ghost cows,” joked Grayson.

“Whatever it is, we don't want to come face to face with it,” said Natalie. “Let's get back in the other tunnel.”

“You mean the dark and dirty one?” I asked.

“No, I mean the safe one,” corrected Natalie.

“Good point.”

We hurried back to the other tunnel and disappeared into the darkness. Then we watched to see who was coming.

The creaking got louder and louder, and soon we could tell it was the sound of metal wheels going over the wooden floor. Every now and then there was a little conversation between two people, although we couldn't make it out.

Finally we saw two men, big strong Level 2s, dressed almost like miners with hardhats and lights. They were pulling an old metal flatbed cart, one of its wheels squeaking with every rotation. And even though it was dark, the cargo was bright and impossible to miss.

Six shining gold bars.

W
e sat quietly in the tunnel until the two men and their cargo were long gone. Other than the steady squeak, squeak, squeak of their wheels fading in the distance, there was no other sound except for the occasional deep breath as we considered the magnitude of what we'd just seen. We crawled out and back into the cattle tunnel.

“Okay, Mr. Math,” Natalie said, turning to Grayson. “How much are we talking about there?”

“Let's see,” he said. “According to what they told us on the tour each bar weighs twenty-seven pounds. That's about $640,000 per bar. Multiply that by six bars and they were carrying around 3.8 million dollars in gold.”

“Why are two L2s moving nearly four million dollars in gold?” asked Alex.

“I imagine they're stealing it,” Natalie said.

“You'd think that,” answered Alex. “But they're walking toward the gold vault, not away from it. They were coming from the river.”

“Should we follow them?” I asked.

Natalie shook her head. “No, that's way too risky. I think we need to get back to the surface and get home.”

“Home sounds good,” Grayson said.

Alex's sense of direction was right on. After about fifteen minutes of walking, the tunnel dumped us out next to the Hudson River.

“This must have been where the cows were unloaded from the boats,” said Liberty.

“Mmmm, that makes me think of hamburgers,” said Alex.

Natalie laughed. “Everything makes you think of hamburgers.”

“That's not true,” he replied. “Little Italy makes me think of lasagna.”

“Okay,” she said. “Everything makes you think of food.”

Alex thought about this. “That's probably true.”

We were covered in dirt, dust, and sweat, but it felt good. We'd managed to escape the Dead Squad's trap and I'd played a big part in that. We also knew that Marek was doing something with the gold from the Federal Reserve.

“I'll get word to your mother about what we found and see what she wants us to do next,” Liberty said.

I was jealous that he had more access to Mom than I did, but I understood. “Great,” I said.

“Let's get home and get some rest,” Natalie said. “Good job, everyone.”

“Especially you, Gopher,” Alex said with a wink.

The others headed uptown while Grayson and I went south toward Battery Park, which is where the morning began. I could tell he was feeling down and wanted someone to talk to.

“My dad's working late tonight and my sister's out with friends,” I said. “Mind if I come hang out with you?”

“That'd be great,” he said.

We took the subway to Fort Greene and walked toward Grayson's neighborhood. After a few minutes without either of us saying a word, he looked up at me, his eyes red.

“I'm quitting,” he said.

“Quitting what?” I asked.

“Omega.”

“You can't.”

“I'm holding everyone back,” he said. “You've got Liberty. You've got Beth. They're not even part of the team but they do more to help than I do.”

There was a bench on the edge of the park and we sat down there.

“I don't get it,” I said. “You're so important to everything we're doing. You're . . . essential.”

He laughed. “For someone who is so good at seeing things that are hidden, how can you possibly miss something so obvious? It happened again today. We got attacked on the corner and everybody took someone out but me.”

“Yes, but . . .”

“And at the Chrysler Building everyone was great . . . but me. Even Beth, who minutes earlier didn't even know that the undead existed, fought like a pro. Me? I would have been thrown off the Chrysler Building if Natalie hadn't come back.”

His face was pained and heartbroken. I knew that Omega meant as much to him as it did to me. This was really hard for him.

“We all help in different ways,” I tried to explain.

“That's a nice way of saying I can't fight,” he replied. “Do you know I've never killed one? In two years I've never once killed a zombie. And on New Year's Eve, I was the one fighting Edmund first. I didn't even slow him down, which is why he was able to do that to Natalie. It is one hundred percent my fault that she is undead.”

“That's absolutely not true,” I told him. “Believe me, because I think it's one hundred percent my fault. You are so valuable to this team, Grayson. You have to see that. I understand why you're upset, but you can't leave us. We need you.”

“I can't even figure out why the tungsten's important, and I've spent months on it. I've studied their records. I've researched geology books. And I'm stumped.”

“Let's solve it right now,” I said. “Tell me everything you know about tungsten.”

“There's too much to even tell.”

“Just start talking,” I said. “What are the basics?”

“Tungsten is a rare, hard metal most often found in Canada, China, and Russia,” he said. “It's gray and shiny. It's used as the filament in lightbulbs and X-ray tubes, none of which have anything to do with Marek.”

“Forget trying to connect it to Marek,” I said. “Just keep telling me about tungsten. It starts with a
T
but its chemical symbol is
W
. What's that about?”

“It comes from the Swedish word
wolfram
,” he said. “Tungsten's chemical number is seventy-four. Its standard atomic weight is 183.84 and its density is 19.25 grams per centimeter cubed.”

And that's where he stopped.

The eyes that were red with tears suddenly turned bright.

“That's it,” he said. “That's how he's doing it.”

I smiled along with him and said, “You know I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, right? You know this is exactly why I said we needed you?”

He looked at me, the white of his teeth appearing brighter than usual because of the remnants of dirt and dust on his face.

“It's
exactly
the same as gold,” he said. “Tungsten's density and its properties are identical to gold. That's what he's doing. He's swapping the tungsten with the gold in the Federal Reserve!”

I
don't know how you go to school here,” Beth said as we walked across the campus. “It looks like it belongs in a horror movie.”

She had a point. Once the home of a notorious mental hospital, MIST's gothic architecture was scary enough on bright sunny days. But a fast-approaching storm had filled the sky with dark clouds, and the first week of summer vacation had given the school a certain level of abandoned eeriness.

“Believe it or not, you get used to it,” I said as I typed a code into a keypad by the door to the library.

“What's the code?” she asked.

I thought I'd give her a chance to test her code-breaking skills. “3, 35, 18, 39.”

“Lithium, bromine, argon, yttrium,” she replied. “Li, Br, Ar, Y. Library. That's easy enough.”

Just as we had that first day beneath CCNY, our Omega team was arriving separately. We walked through the library without turning on any lights, navigating the stacks and the bookcases quickly. We took the stairs down to special collections, where the air had the scent of dust and old literature.

“Look at those girls!”

We looked across the room to see Mom waiting for us. The security light over her head gave her a slight green haze.

“I miss you two so much.”

She came over and hugged us, and before the others arrived we spent a few minutes talking about mundane things like our plans for the summer and the particulars of Beth's job at the drama camp. Those are the details that meant the most to her, the little things that filled in the pictures of our lives.

Alex and Grayson joined us a few minutes later. And a few minutes after that Natalie arrived with Liberty.

“So I hear you guys have been busy,” Mom said. “Let's see if we can figure out what to do next.”

She led us back through the special collections to a small reading room. It looked like something you'd find in an old English manor, with a pair of overstuffed chairs, floor to ceiling oak bookcases, and even a fireplace. Without hesitating she walked right up to the fireplace, ducked down, and entered it. She pushed on the brick wall in the back and it opened up onto a staircase.

“This way,” she said, directing us down the staircase.

This led us to a cozy studio apartment that had a similar vibe as the reading room. There were bookcases and books everywhere.

“Welcome to my home,” said Milton Blackwell as he greeted each one of us with a hearty handshake.

“I thought your home was the lab underneath CCNY,” I said.

He laughed. “When you're over 140 years old, you get to have more than one. That's more my home to work and this is more my home to relax and think. It's where I lived the whole time I was principal of MIST. I like it because it keeps me close to school and because it comes with a fully-stocked library upstairs.”

We all settled down on comfortable couches, and he poured us hot tea and served cookies.

“Liberty filled us in on most of what you've learned, but we wanted to get everybody together,” Mom said. “Let's go around the room and try to paint a full picture of what Marek's up to.”

“First of all, he's stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the Federal Reserve Bank,” Grayson said. “He was part of the construction team that built the vault back in the 1920s and he must have left some sort of back door entrance that cuts through the Manhattan schist. All the security is focused on protecting it from above ground. No one would have thought you could come from underneath.”

“That's not even the brilliant part,” said Alex. “Tell him how he's beating all the checks and balances.”

“He's swapping the gold bars a few at a time with bars made out of tungsten and coated with a layer of gold.”

Milton's head bobbed up and down as he did some mental calculations. “That
is
brilliant. Their properties are almost identical. They'd pass a lot of tests.”

“That's exactly right,” said Grayson.