Quinn hurried over. Instead of concrete like the rest of the floor, here was a four-foot-square piece of metal. It was dark and showing signs of rust along the edges, but otherwise was in remarkably good shape. There were hinges along the left side and a latch on the right. Through a loop on the latch was a large, very new padlock.
“Shall I?” Orlando asked.
“It might be wired also,” Quinn said.
“Should be easy enough to check,” she said. “The metal’s warped at this end.”
Without waiting to hear what Quinn thought, she got down onto the floor and pressed the side of her face against the concrete. She moved her light so that it played into the opening, moving it back and forth several times. After a minute passed, she sat back up.
“Clean,” she said.
“You’re sure?” Quinn asked.
“Enough to stake your life on it.”
“My life?”
She moved over to the padlock, removed her set of lock picks from her backpack, then set to work. It took her less than thirty seconds to open it.
“This is the part where you open the door,” she said after she removed the lock from the loop on the latch.
“Maybe Nate should do it,” Quinn said.
She stared at him. “You trust me that little?”
Quinn let out a short laugh, then reached down. “You might want to stand back. Just in case you’re wrong.”
“Oh, I’m not wrong,” she said. But she took a few steps back anyway.
Quinn smiled, then pulled the trapdoor up. There was a loud groan as the hinges protested under the weight of the metal door. Quinn swung it all the way open so that it was leaning against the back wall.
“You guys all right in there?” Nate called.
“We’re fine,” Quinn and Orlando said in unison.
Orlando shone her light into the opening, revealing a steep, narrow concrete stairway.
“Nate,” Quinn said, voice raised. “We’ll be on radio.”
“Radio?” Nate said. “Where are you going?”
“That’s a good question.”
Quinn looked at Orlando, then mounted the steps and started down. He could hear her following him a few feet back.
“What’s going on?” Nate said in his ear.
Quinn gave him a quick description of what they’d found.
“So I just wait here while you guys have all the fun?”
“Call Peter,” Quinn said. “Get an ETA on his men.”
“Okay,” Nate said. “What if he asks me what we’ve found?”
“Tell him I’ll call him when we’re done.”
The steps of the stairwell were made of stone and spiraled downward. It reminded Quinn of some he had climbed in old European churches, just tread after tread surrounded by walls and ceiling. A curving tunnel leading to God knew where.
When they reached the bottom, there was only one way to go, a brick-lined tunnel leading away from the stairs. Unlike the cramped space of the staircase, this tunnel was wide enough for them to walk side by side, and the gently curving ceiling just tall enough for them to stand upright without being concerned about head injuries. In the distance they could hear a low rumble, almost more a feeling than a noise.
“So someone was trying to hide a secret entrance into the building,” Orlando said.
“Or a secret exit,” Quinn said. “Say you’re afraid of being followed. You could duck into this building, come down to this tunnel … and from here you can probably get anywhere.”
“Should we stop?” Orlando asked. “Or should we see what’s ahead?”
“Let’s go on a little longer. I’d like to see where this lets out.”
There was a trickle of water running along the floor heading in the same direction they were, indicating a downward slope. The bricks of the walls and ceiling looked old. Quinn guessed the tunnel might be even older than the abandoned building above, perhaps from the early 1900s or the late 1800s.
“Quinn,” Nate’s voice said in Quinn’s ear. “Should … think?”
“Nate, repeat. I missed that.”
“Can’t… you.”
“The signal doesn’t travel well down here,” Orlando said.
“Nate, hang tight.”
“What?”
“Hang tight,” Quinn repeated. Copy…
“Nate?” Quinn said.
There was nothing but dead air. They had moved out of range.
Ahead, the tunnel seemed to go on forever. The beams of their flashlights pushed the darkness back only so far before the black took over again.
“What
It was the rumble. It had grown louder as they moved deeper into the tunnel.
“Subway,” Quinn said.
Though the noise was basically constant, it ebbed and flowed like trains would do as they moved through the busy New York system.
“Something up there,” Quinn said.
An opening in the wall along the right.
As they neared it, Quinn’s first guess was an intersection tunnel. But soon he saw that whatever it was, it was covered by an old wooden door. Decades of dampness, with an assist from unseen termites, meant at best it had only a few more years before it fell apart on the spot.
But the door wasn’t the only thing that was deteriorating.
“Smell it?” Quinn said.
“Yes.”
He shoved at the door with the end of his flashlight. It resisted at first, then began to swing open, scraping the floor as it did. The smell was stronger now, almost overpowering. What made it worse was the noise that accompanied it, a combination of smacking and chomping.
As Quinn shone his light into the room, dozens of rats scattered in every direction. Several even headed out the door and between Quinn’s and Orlando’s feet.
“Dammit!” Orlando said as she jumped to her left.
“You all right?” Quinn asked.
“I swear to God one of them tried to crawl up my leg.”
Quinn scanned the room with the light again. Except for the most tenacious ones, most of the rodents were gone now. Those that remained glanced up every few seconds, seeming to dare Quinn to try to make them leave.
In the center of the room was the feast they’d all been enjoying. The body of a man.
Quinn stepped across the threshold. Again the rats looked up but didn’t move.
The space appeared to be an old equipment room, long retired. There were bolts extending up out of the floor where machinery had once been secured. Pipes, some as wide as six inches, stuck down from the ceiling in a group. They were all truncated, their open ends either once connected to the long-gone machines or created that way to serve as conduits for cables and wires to pass through to the world above. There were no other doors out, no storage cabinets, no tunnels in the floor. Just the rats, and the memory of the machines, and the dead guy.
“Too well dressed to have been living down here, don’t you think?” Orlando said.
She had come in behind him, and was following close, flashlight in one hand and gun in the other. Quinn thought if another rat came within a few feet of her, she’d shoot it.
“Yeah,” Quinn said.
