the street, and he could hear the reporters breathlessly blathering on about nothing. There was little to report so far. Everybody was standing around talking or watching the Haz-Mat teams enter the building and people coming out: senators, staffers, and Serena Serghetti.
An alarm went off in his head, the one that never gave false readings. What was she doing here?
Then it hit him: Conrad Yeats.
15
A FEW MINUTES before the alarms went off, the public tour of the U.S. Capitol was running behind schedule. So Conrad was still inside the original north wing, impatiently standing outside the Old Supreme Court chamber, staring at a plaque that read: Beneath this tablet is the original cornerstone for this building.
Like most things coming out of Washington, D.C., the plaque wasn't entirely true, as the pleasant docent explained to the group, which included a dozen Boy Scouts from Wyoming.
'The plaque on the wall refers to the tablet on the floor before you, and the tablet on the floor only marks the spot where a former Architect of the Capitol once believed the cornerstone resided.'
Conrad looked down at the stone, which was about four feet wide and two feet tall and embedded into the floor, and read the engraving:
LAID MASONICALLY SEPT. 17, 1932
IN COMMEMORATION OF THE LAYING OF THE ORIGINAL CORNERSTONE BY GEORGE WASHINGTON
'So we've got plaques commemorating stones in commemoration of other stones,' muttered the scoutmaster next to Conrad in the back as the group finally headed to the crypt. 'Am I missing something?'
'Just your federal tax dollars,' Conrad replied and looked at his watch. The Capitol Police were probably already sending text alerts to higher-ups and it was all going to trickle down in a very loud display of alarms any second now.
The tour ended at the crypt under the rotunda, where George Washington was supposed to be buried. It was a vast chamber with 40 massive Doric columns of Virginia sandstone, upon which rested the rotunda and dome above, much like America itself rested on Washington. In the center of the black marble floor was a white starburst.
'This crypt is the heart of Washington, D.C., and the end of our tour,' the docent said. 'Following Pierre L'Enfant's design, the city's four quadrants all originate at the U.S. Capitol. The starburst on the floor of this crypt is the center.'
The starburst marked what was to be a window into the tomb of George Washington beneath the crypt. The idea was that Washington could look up from his tomb and ultimately see his glorified self in heaven as painted on the ceiling of the capitol dome. Only Washington wasn't in the tomb below-his widow Martha had insisted he be buried at the couple's Mount Vernon estate.
As the tourists took turns standing on the starburst, Conrad drifted off to the wide marble staircase nearby and walked down to the subbasement level of the Capitol, passing several glass-enclosed offices packed like mouse cages.
He took an immediate right back under the stairs and passed a sign that read 'No visitors allowed,' just as the public alarms went off.
Now he had to move fast. He had only minutes to find the cornerstone before the Haz-Mat teams reached the subbasement levels.
He glanced back at the small warren of offices behind him. Staffers, mostly scruffy middle-aged types with PDAs, were shaking their heads, gathering belongings and heading for the exits. Conrad proceeded up a few crumbling stone steps, passing a nuclear fallout shelter sign as he entered a long, yellow brick tunnel.
He pulled out his modified smartphone and looked at the screen with the schematics and GPS tracker. Conrad was the white flashing dot in the maze.
At the end of the tunnel was a black iron gate like something out of a medieval church, and beyond the gate the tomb intended for George and Martha Washington. The only thing inside the tomb was the catafalque, the structure on which the corpse of Abraham Lincoln, the first president to die in office, rested when he lay in state for public viewing in the rotunda after his assassination.
Conrad turned to his right and saw the rust-colored access door he was looking for. It was marked:
SBC4M
DANGER
Mechanical Equipment
Authorized Personnel Only
It had no handle or knob, but he thought he could pry it open. As he did, he heard the scrape of metal against stone behind him, and turned to see the metal door marked SB-21 on the opposite side of the tunnel open.
A technician emerged in a work outfit and a look of surprise when he saw Conrad. 'There's an evacuation alert, sir.'
'Yes, they're passing these out.' Conrad pulled a surgical mask from his suit pocket. 'Take it,' he said and smothered it over the man's mouth.
Conrad pushed him back through the door, and the man crumpled to the floor next to some electrical machinery. Conrad closed the door behind him, picked up the chloroform-soaked mask and dragged the technician past a bank of equipment and exposed piping to a utility room.
Inside he found a single marble bathtub, a relic of the old Senate spa that offered members of Congress and their guests hot tubs, haircuts, and massages. He put the man inside the tub, closed the utility door and moved down to the old furnace area.
According to the GPS marker on his phone, he was near enough to the northeast corner of the central portion of the Capitol to use his pocket sonar. He popped what looked like a memory card into the slot atop the handheld device. A thermal-like image of red and yellow splotches against a glowing green backdrop filled the small screen.
DARPA had developed the pocket sonar for Special Ops forces searching for small underground structures like caves that could serve as hiding places for weapons of mass destruction or tunnels for smuggling weapons and terrorist infiltrators across borders. Conrad had adapted the sonar for exploring megalithic pyramids and temples in order to find and map his own secret chambers and passageways. Today he was looking for a hollow space in a foundation stone-the cornerstone.
He had done it once before, under remarkably similar circumstances, when he helped historians in Hawaii find a long-lost time capsule buried by King Kamehameha V in the cornerstone of the landmark Aliiolani Hale building. They knew the cornerstone contained photos of royal families dating back to Kamehameha the Great and the constitution of the Hawaiian kingdom. What they didn't know was its exact location. Conrad helped them find it within ten minutes, using his pocket sonar to locate the hollow spot in the northeast corner of the building.
He had to beat that record now.
Conrad watched the screen of the sonar as he made his way toward the southeast corner beneath the original north wing. For a second he thought he had something, but it turned out to be an old grating in the stone that led to the massive steam pipes.
There are miles of underground utility pipes that provide heat and steam from the Capitol Power Plant to the Capitol campus and surrounding areas. And these miles and miles of pipes were maintained by a team of ten employees from the office of the Architect of the Capitol.
Ten men to maintain miles of underground pipes.
His GPS tracker beeped and then he saw it, the dirt trench he was looking for. It was about three feet wide and four feet deep, dug by a previous Architect of the Capitol along with members of the U.S. Geological Survey. They had used metal detectors to look for the silver cornerstone plate beneath the stone, but had never found
