Darkside (38 page)

Once at the intersection, he turned off his flashlight to see how far the anteroom light penetrated. It didn't. The darkness was absolute. The curve—you're forgetting that the tunnel curves, he told himself. He snapped the light on again; then, holding the tight white beam down at his feet, he walked toward the oak doors. His feet made no sound in the flourlike dust. When he figured he had rounded most of the curve, he turned the flashlight off again. To his surprise, the dim arch of light he'd been expecting to see as he neared the doors wasn't there anymore. Jim stopped dead. No light meant one of two things: Either the door he'd bolted open was now closed. Or the main tunnel lights had all gone out.

He flattened himself against the left-hand side of the tunnel and tried to think. He felt a tickle of mortar dust against the back of his neck. The bricks pressing against his right hip seemed to move a tiny bit. They felt like ceramic snake scales. He forced the image out of his mind.

He hadn't shone the flashlight down the tunnel. It had been pointed at his feet. It was still almost a hundred feet, maybe even more, to the anteroom below the oak doors. His footfalls were not audible. So if someone was waiting for him up there in the darkened anteroom, he shouldn't know that Jim was approaching. He tapped the Indiglo light on his watch. Three minutes until his call-in time. Hell, he could just wait right here and let the PWC crew come looking. Except they wouldn't know he'd come into the Fort Severn tunnels, would they? Shit.

He realized he'd had his eyes shut in the darkness. He opened them. No change. The total darkness of a cave. Or tomb. He listened but could hear nothing, either from the tunnel or the surface above. After a minute, he imagined that he could hear the fine sound of mortar dust falling on the floor. Like the sand in an hourglass. He bent down and lifted the Glock from his ankle holster. It wasn't chambered, and if he did chamber it, that noise would definitely carry down here. As he stood back up, his belt caught on the exposed corner of a brick and it moved. Definitely
moved. And then it slid out of the wall with a small sound and thudded down into the deep dust by his ankle. Then another one came out, and suddenly he felt the whole wall press out against his back. He froze in place, straining his back muscles to hold the tottering masonry in place. He felt his heart beating wildly as he thought about the arch over his head. If the wall gave way, would the arch come down? Hell yes.

He flattened his shoulders and pressed against the wall as another brick slid between his legs and landed with a click against one of the first bricks. Then a third popped out of the wall and landed on his right shoulder, perching there for an instant before dropping into the dust. Then things stopped moving. He felt a sneeze coming on as the air filled with dust.

Gotta move, he thought frantically. Which way? Left, of course, up the tunnel, toward the oak door.

Sure about that? Or was the door to my right? I didn't turn around, did I? Another brick slid down the back of his pants leg and clicked against one already on the floor.

Hell with this shit, he thought. First, he racked the slide and chambered a round. The sound seemed enormous in the darkness. Unmistakable, too. Then he pumped himself off the wall, going to his left, and switched on the Maglite. Behind him, a whole section of the wall slumped to the floor in a muffled rattle of bricks. Amazingly, the ceiling didn't come raining down behind it. He switched the gun to his left hand and walked fast up toward the anteroom, holding the flashlight out in his right hand while keeping his body pressed to the left side of the tunnel, just in case someone started shooting. But when he reached the anteroom, it was empty. He made sure, even sweeping the light up over the ceiling to look for suspended vampires.

He shone the light back down the tunnel from which he had just come. It remained empty except for an ominous cloud of white dust that seemed to be approaching like some kind of billowing ghost. His heart in his throat, he pulled on the huge door. It swung gently back, spilling white light
from the main tunnel back into the anteroom. He poked his head and the Glock out into the main tunnel, but everything was as he'd left it. A little more noise from all the utility lines, but the place was definitely empty. He looked behind him as the white cloud expanded silently into the anteroom. Glancing at his watch, he realized his time was up. He stepped up into the main tunnel, pulled the big oak door closed and locked it, then hurried up the tunnel to the first available grate where he could get topside and use a cell phone to call the PWC people. Assuming he could get his voice to work—his throat was dry as all that mortar dust. He shivered as he thought of that tunnel collapsing all along its length. And nobody would have known he'd been down in there.

He drove back to the marina after checking in with PWC. As he was getting out of his truck at the marina parking lot, a thought hit him like a small hammer. He had left the bolt protruding on that damned door to keep it open. But it had been completely shut when he got to it. So who the hell had moved the bolt? It would have taken a key to do that. If it had been their runner, then there would be no trapping him in the Fort Severn tunnel. Not now that Jim had been detected down there. He swore out loud, startling a couple getting into the car next to his. He gave them a weak smile and headed for the boat and a badly needed drink. He wondered if Branner was back from D.C. yet.

 

Branner called Jim on his cell phone an hour after he got back to the boat. She was back from Washington and just entering Annapolis. He invited her to come over to the boat for a nightcap, and she arrived fifteen minutes later. He poured two snifters of single malt and told her about what he'd found down in the abandoned tunnels. He showed her the probable exit point on one of the maps.

“I took a look, although it was dark. I'm guessing it's a light standard,” he said. “One of these towers along here that light the tennis courts behind Bancroft Hall. Or a man
hole. They probably hit the magazine vent pipe by accident when they put the lights in and just left it. Those standards are hollow.”

“So he doesn't have to use one of the Yard grates?”

“Right. Nobody, not even PWC, goes into the old Fort Severn tunnels. They're lethal. They weren't very happy about my going down there.”

“Where the hell did he get keys?”

“Those locks are old, very old. The doors are solid oak. I think those locks could be picked with a thin screwdriver. The point is, no one's been looking. The guys who maintain the utility tunnels couldn't imagine anyone being dumb enough to go into those death traps.”

“You included?” she said, eyebrows rising.

“Trust me, having been down twice, I don't want to go back. But there's more.” He told her about the bolt being moved after he had left it protruding.

“Shit. So you think he was down there? And knew you were down there?”

“Not the first time, either,” Jim said. “The tennis ball came down the tunnel right when I was there to see it. He knows when someone else is in the tunnels after hours.”

She sighed, sat back in her chair, and sipped some scotch. She looked really tired. “So, how'd your trip go?” he asked.

“Frustrating. There are two camps at headquarters. One wants to flood the mugger case with agents—ours, Feebs, marshals, whatever. NCIS doesn't lose agents.”

“Except that he was on his own time, wasn't he? I'll bet there are people saying this wasn't an operational loss.”

She nodded. “Yeah, that's right. And of course he has family, and, officially, the agency doesn't want to say that Bagger hit a bar, got drunk, followed some girls, and got whacked.”

“So what
was
he doing—a follow-up to an ongoing investigation? Conducting a joint investigation with the Academy security officer, who was looking into unauthorized intruders into the Academy's underground utility areas?”

“Something like that,” she said. “They were wondering if you'd go along with that.”

“Absolutely,” he said. “The bosses know the real score. No sense in dissing Bagger's good name. Anything on the Dell case?”

“Harry Chang's running some kind of game with that one, I think. Strong sense that SecNav's office wants the Dell case put to bed. As in, Lose the homicide angle.”

“That would sell well here. But what about my theory—that the two cases are related?”

She finished her scotch and put the snifter down on a table. “I'm not sure. Harry's intrigued, but there's no real evidence. He told me after the main meeting that the only way he could hold off the ‘send a mob' crowd is by saying that it might spook the runner.”

“Who could, if he wanted to, just decide to stay in Bancroft Hall, run no more, and then graduate right on time and take his sick-ass, criminal mind out into the world of commissioned officers.”

“The thing is,” she said, “if this is the guy who did Bagger, we want him clean and prosecutable. Not mired in some complex web with the Dell case.”

“Well hell,” Jim said. “Then we need to move out. Stop talking about it.”

She rubbed her face with her hand.

“You look beat to shit,” he said, getting up. “Why don't you go home, get some rest, and then I'll come over to your office in the late morning? Then let's go see the deputy dant and stir up the Honor Committee bees. Or did you already do that?”

“I called Rogers. I declined to tell him what it was about, only that we needed to move out smartly. He said to bring it on.”

“Okay, I'll snoop around the admin building first thing in the morning. Word of your call will have come through by then. I'll see what the walls are saying.”

She agreed with that and they walked up on deck. The harbor was silently beautiful in the moonlight. The gray
granite bulk of Bancroft Hall shone across the glimmering black water, although most of the room lights were out by now. “I don't know,” she said, looking across at the Academy precincts. “I think I'm perfectly willing to let the Dell case fall out however the elephants want it to. This shit with Bagger, though…I want the sumbitch who did that.”

Jim nodded. “I want him, too, especially if he's a mid. He's a fucking alien.”

 

Better and better. I hear someone's going before the Honor Committee. Right before graduation, even. Anyone you know? My little web is beginning to close. Wonder who the BIO will be? Wouldn't it be rich if they use Tommy Hays? Man, but I love to screw around with the system, and it looks like the system is going to do exactly what I want it to do. There are consequences when people cross me. Especially when they were once my friends. Well, for a little while anyway. Can't say as I have any friends at this place, but then, I never expected to. All these shiny white faces, all with parents who have the same name as they do. I've often wondered what it must have been like, growing up in one of those perfect, made-for-television families. With each kid getting his or her own room. New clothes every year. A car. Being able to cruise the malls with people just like them.

The Shark, you see, never had any of that. In a sense, that's how he became the Shark. We are solitary beings. And let me tell you, the juvie system will damn well teach you what solitary means. Whether in Juvie Hall or in a foster home, you'd better be solitary. Otherwise, it's the gangs, with all their hip-hop secret sign bullshit, scabby women, and tribal boundaries, or maybe it's foster daddy creeping the back stairs at night, looking for what foster mama doesn't want to give him anymore. It's going to school, year after year, even the parochial school, knowing you don't belong there, because you're not like them, not like any of them. It's a solitary feeling, but I'm cool with it now, be
cause it's the source of my strength. When you operate alone, when you hunt alone, when you crush your enemies all by yourself, no one can rob you of the victories. No one can betray you. Hell, most of the time, no one can even see you. Just like my classmates here at Canoe U don't see me. They don't want to. They know I'm different, and if it weren't for a few overachieving cells in the math and science part of my brain, they'd have had my ass out of here a long time ago. My own classmates!

Which is why I undertook to screw the system. To lie, cheat, and steal with vigor. To role-play by day and then consort with the other end of the human spectrum by night. Not just to run plebes but to terrorize plebes. To taste, whenever possible, the bounties of some of these lovely mids, and then to degrade them. I know what they really think of me, and I feed their preconceptions. Big, shaved-head, bruising Dyle, who shouldn't be here. Strong in body, no getting around that, but hardly the kind we'd want to see at the Officers Club cotillion. Book-smart in the techie world, but gets mysteriously good grades in the bull world, too. Looks like he couldn't even read. Going Marine option, we understand. Snigger. Snigger. That fits: What the hell does a Marine need with being able to read and write? Look at him: six-feet-plus tall, six feet across the shoulders, six feet through the chest, Man Mountain Dean in the flesh. Makes all that noise. Can march like a robot. Face like the Terminator. Shoes to blind the uniform inspector. Creases on his creases. A perfect rack in his room, but no roommate, we understand?

They can laugh, but what they don't know is going to hurt them. The whole class will be tarred with what I do in the next week. I expect to get away with it, but if I don't, well, hell, screw 'em all if they can't take a joke. My being here has been a joke, a bad one, I'll grant you, but that's what you get when you allow the Navy's premier penitentiary to indulge in a little social engineering. And I'm all set for those two featherweight cops who've been sneaking around my tunnels. They think they're going to trap me down there.
Well, there're traps, and then there're traps. Oh, am I waiting. I have the most interesting surprises set up for them. And maybe one or two for you, too. You just think it's over, don't you? Not hardly.