washer’s instrument panel, listing make, model, and energy usage information. From its base he peeled a strip of yellow tape imprinted with a sequence of one- and two-digit numbers. “This serial number’s not the actual serial number.” Carefully he maneuvered the first dial into place, then began on the second.
Charlie’s eyes bounced between the cylindrical entryway and the garage door, anticipating Fielding and company would at any second send one or the other blasting inward.
“Okay, done, except for the clicker.” Drummond jogged toward a tool cabinet across the room. “While I find it, why don’t you put on a uniform?” He indicated a hanger rack of royal blue Perriman Appliances repairmen’s coveralls. On the floor were pairs of rubber boots. “You’ll be conspicuous in it once we’re out of the complex but not as much as in what you have on now.” He meant Charlie’s boxers.
As Charlie dressed, a staccato movement sucked his eyes back to the bomb. The second hand on the alarm clock was ticking counterclockwise. Every hair on his body shot up.
“Dad!”
“Sorry, should have mentioned that. I’m intentionally running the timer down to about ninety seconds-too little time for them to retrieve the PAL sequence from the computers and dial in the numbers in reverse, to disarm the device.” Drummond crumpled the strip of yellow tape with the “serial number” into a ball no bigger than a pea, then dropped it through a drain grate. “But it will be plenty of time for us to trigger the device, if it comes to that, then get out of harm’s way.” From the tool cabinet, he dug out what appeared to be a TV remote control. Aiming it at the washing machine, he pressed a button. The conic bulb on the gadget’s head glowed red.
The second hand on the alarm clock ticked to a stop at the 6. The hour hand was slightly left of the 12 and the minute hand pointed halfway between the 10 and the 11.
“Ninety seconds on the nose,” he said with satisfaction.
Charlie mopped perspiration from his brow. “After all we’ve been through, it would be a shame to die of a heart attack.”
Drummond smiled. “Well, what do you say we go for a boat ride?”
18
The laundry room’s garage door rumbled up, revealing the midpoint of the two-block-long tunnel between the heart of the Manhattan Project complex and the Perriman subbasement. Charlie braced for men waiting in ambush. He saw only an empty tunnel. The floor twinkled with flecks of the fluorescent bulbs shattered earlier by bullets.
Drummond pointed to the end leading into the subbasement. “I’ll cover you from here until you’re safely through the door.”
“Won’t I need your retina to open the door?”
“On this side, all you’ll need to do is use the handle. You’ll trip a sensor though, so they’ll be onto us, if they aren’t already.”
“But if I’m inside the subbasement, how can I cover you?”
“You can’t, not over the length of the tunnel. That’s where the clicker comes in. The big red detonator button is pressure sensitive. If I’m shot, or, for whatever reason, I fall and lose my grip on the clicker, the sequence initiates and can only be reversed manually on the bomb. They won’t risk that.”
“See you in the subbasement then,” Charlie said, the bravado intended to mask his foreboding: This was the most treacherous block he would ever travel.
He reached the end of the tunnel without incident. A simple turn of the handle unlocked the door, and it opened with a gentle push. Holding his gun ahead of him, the way Drummond did, he edged into the silent subbasement.
If not for the fluorescent ring in the stairwell, he would have been unable to see. The scant light silhouetted three splayed bodies, pools of blood glinting around each. He recognized Grudzev’s sloped face. The Russian’s AK- 74 rig was propped against the back of his head like a grave marker. If Charlie had had time, he would have been sick.
He turned back to the door, still partway open, as Drummond emerged with caution from the laundry room. Sudden motion at the other end of the tunnel froze them both.
The door there opened and Fielding entered the tunnel along with two equally solemn guards, both pointing large rifles at Drummond.
Drummond raised his hands. “I’m holding a pressure key to one of the Pristinas,” he called to them. He stood a full city block away from Charlie-as well as from Fielding and the guards-but the tunnel’s acoustics were such that it sounded as if he were just halfway down a typical hallway.
Fielding leaned an eye into a rifle scope. Two blocks away, Charlie could hear the rattle of the rifle’s shoulder strap. Fielding muttered something, both men lowered their guns, then he said to Drummond, “There’s no need for this to get unpleasant.”
“Then have a pleasant evening, Nicholas.” Drummond turned and began walking toward Charlie at a swift pace, though not too swift to jeopardize his hold on the clicker.
“I have some news for you first,” Fielding said. Drummond didn’t slow. “At the top of the hour, a Department of Transportation camera snapped an image of Patrick Bragg, captain of the stern dragger Sea Dog. He was removing a vinyl pouch with a Chevrolet logo on it from beneath a sidewalk plate in Grand Army Plaza; five minutes earlier, another man had placed it there. According to the accident report, Captain Bragg subsequently stepped into the path of a van that jumped a red light. He was killed instantly.”
Drummond’s eyes darkened, but he said nothing and continued toward Charlie.
“For argument’s sake, let’s say his death was necessary,” Fielding went on. “The argument is there are too many frightening characters out there who need to believe that Drummond Clark is a relatively humdrum appliance salesman as opposed to a spymaster. If you’re aboard the SS International Fugitive, word could get around, and those characters would start asking questions the United States of America would prefer they do not-and that’s assuming you haven’t already sketched out the whole operation for them. So I’ll ask you now to bear in mind the oath you took to obey the orders of those above you in the chain of command-in this instance our interim national security advisor in Washington-and stand down.”
Charlie expected Drummond to whirl back and point out that such an order would never have been issued had the interim national security advisor known that Fielding had murdered the prior national security advisor in cold blood.
All Drummond said was, “Nicholas, I’ll ask you to either respect my most basic right or suffer the consequences.” He was now a short dash from Charlie-fifty feet at most, a difficult shot now for the men at the other end of the tunnel.
“What about you, Charlie?” Fielding called over Drummond. “There must be something you want? How about I erase Mickey Ramirez’s wife from the loose ends list?”
Charlie’s heart strings were wrenched. “She just had a baby.”
Fielding shrugged. “That happens.”
Charlie suspected Fielding would erase Sylvia one way or the other. “There is one thing I want,” he said.
“Yes?”
“To be a witness at your trial.”
“Okay, then we’ve run into a wall.” Fielding struck a match and lit a cigar. “As it were.” He exhaled smoke toward a gunmetal gray plate on the ceiling.
The peal of an alarm bell filled the complex.
“Shit!” Drummond said.
Charlie had never heard him curse.
Drummond held the clicker tight against his belly, took three running strides, then dove for the subbasement. Charlie crouched like a shortstop in order to best haul him in.
Steel slats cascaded from the ceiling, hammering the tunnel floor between Charlie and Drummond with a ringing echo, then forming a solid firewall. There were no discernible gaps between the slats themselves, or between the slats and the tunnel walls and floor. Charlie threw a shoulder. The firewall gave a millimeter, if that,
