Gabriel climbed down, walked over, and stared at a small trickle of wine disappearing into the crack.
'Don't you think you should get ready?' Harper looked toward the door. 'In a sec.'
Gabriel rapped on the area around the crack. Hollow. He rapped on a spot about five feet over. Solid. He tore at the crack, peeling off concrete fragments. 'What is it?' Harper asked.
'Maybe a better way out,' Gabriel said as he worked at the wall. As the bolt sounds in the outside tunnel grew louder, the concrete came off in bigger pieces, revealing the mesh of reinforcing metal. The cool dankness of trapped air made its way through the mesh.
'Holy hell!' Gabriel said as he pulled at the bottom. The metal bent outward as he pulled loose the soft metal wires used to fix the mesh to the cave walls. With a final heave, Gabriel lifted the bottom up more than three feet, enough to crawl through. 'Here,' Gabriel said to Harper. 'Let me help you through.'
An excited voice sounded outside the door. Someone had found the stream of wine.
'We don't know where it leads,' Harper said. 'Or if it leads anywhere at all.'
Outside, they heard the thuds of running footsteps.
'That's right, Doc, but life's like that, isn't it? We know we have a tough fight the other way. I say we make a choice and pray for the best.'
The bolt on the door rattled tentatively.
Harper accepted Gabriel's outstretched hand.
'Wise decision, young man.'
'From you, I'm honored.'
Harper wasn't halfway in when the bolt screeched all the way back. 'Keep moving, Doc,' Gabriel called as he rushed to the barrel stack and scaled it with an ease that amazed him.*****
Jasmine's heart trip-hammered as she watched Tyrone paging through scene after scene from Castello Da Vinci's security cameras.
'Now, listen.' He clicked on a button on one camera image, and the sounds of distant voices came from the laptop's speakers.
'Every camera also picks up sound.'
'That's amazing.'
Then Kilgore's voice came through on the walkie-talkie. 'We're in.'
'Okay, help me for a minute,' Jasmine said to Tyrone as she grabbed the walkietalkie, plugged in the earbuds and lavalier mike.
'I don't suppose you can locate Brad and the rest?' She clipped the walkie-talkie to her belt and got out of the truck. Tyrone followed her.
'Not too soon, I hope,' Tyrone said.
'Why?' Jasmine opened the camper shell and dropped the tailgate. Tyrone came around the side and helped Jasmine pull out one of the radio-controlled airplanes.
'Because if I can see them, so can Braxton's security people.'
CHAPTER 94
Rex summoned us with a stage whisper.
Kilgore and I jogged over and nearly slipped on the wet. The unmistakable fragrance of wine saturated the air. Red wine, to be exact. I bent over, wet my finger in the liquid, and tasted it.
'Young cabernet sauvignon.'
Rex shook his head, then slid the bolt, eliciting a shrill, tortured sound that immediately attracted the beams of powerful flashlights and echoes of sprinting combat boots.
'Freeze!' someone shouted.
'I'm out of here.'' Rex said as he muscled the door open. A thundering detonation showered us with wine and pieces of wood.
'The hell?' Rex yelled as he leapt back. Then another barrel exploded against the floor, followed by another and another.
'Jesus Christ, Joseph, Mary, and the donkey!' Rex cursed.
Braxton's security guards drew closer. Cautiously, we looked through the partly opened door at the carnage of expensive French oak and cabernet. Braxton's men closed to half a dozen paces.
'Hands up!' they shouted.
Heedless of the barrel barrage, Rex lunged over the priceless wreckage as Braxton's men grabbed my arm.*****
Colonel William Lewis paced calmly among his troops in the back of the shabby Napa storefront and listened intently to the radio traffic in his earbud. Lewis's troops were used to him communicating with the 'Old Man,' as they called Kilgore. They just had no idea where Kilgore was located.
'Sir, we've picked up some interesting stuff.' Lewis turned and looked up into the face of Janet King, a fast- rising corporal, a Penn State lacrosse and rugby star (men's teams) with a computer science degree, who'd enlisted 'because I was tired of the way politicians always piss on the military.' She also hated being called 'an Amazon.' At sixone, 193 pounds, and a percent body fat she had to struggle to keep out of single digits, Corporal King had the wherewithal to make her objections stick. 'What've you got?'
'They've gone to the equivalent of general quarters over what appears to be intruders.'
Lewis said a silent prayer. 'Could it be a faulty alarm or something?' She shook her head. 'They've apparently made contact and have apprehended two people.'
Lewis nodded and tried to appear calm.*****
'Whoa! Holy cow, holy cow!'
Tyrone leaped from the truck and ran around the back to Jasmine, who'd been pacing the hard-packed lane ever since she had finished connecting the electrical detonators to the accessory circuits of the aircraft. Jasmine turned.
'The security control screen has gone apeshit!'
'Show me.'
'C'mon.' Tyrone rushed back into the truck with Jasmine close behind. Inside,
Tyrone held up the laptop.
'Notice the red flashes? Those were all green a minute ago.'
'This looks like a diagram of the London underground,' she said calmly. 'It's similar… part schematic, part spatial reality.'
'I don't think this is a good sign.' Jasmine shook her head and looked back at the screen. 'What are those little icons?'
Tyrone took the laptop back and set it on the console between the two front seats so they could both see. He tickled the laptop's touch pad and used it to center the cursor over an icon. The mouseover text appeared on- screen.
'Security camera. If we click on the link, it gives details.'
'This like a webcam?' Jasmine asked.
'Just like. They have lots of cameras hooked on an internal network. Lots of places are going to IP-based systems because they're cheap to build and can be programmed and implemented quickly.'
'IP?'
'Internet protocols.' He bent over the screen, working the cursor and keyboard. A moment later, the image of a deserted hallway appeared. 'There!' Tyrone said triumphantly as he clicked from one camera image to another. His triumph lasted only seconds as a jerky video showed Brad Stone and Jack Kilgore being escorted by armed guards.
'Oh, God!'
