The guy nodded. He knew why I was asking. I was fresh out of computer cords, so I had to keep half an eye on him while I found the gun and loaded it. Loading it was a jigsaw puzzle. I wasn’t familiar with the technology. I had to proceed on common sense and logic alone. Clearly the trigger mechanism tripped the gas release. Clearly the gas propelled the dart. And guns are basically simple machines. They have fronts and backs. Cause and effect happens in a rational sequence. I got the thing charged up inside forty seconds.
I said, ‘You want to lie down on the floor?’
The guy didn’t answer.
I said, ‘You know, to save bumping your head.’
The guy got down on the floor.
I asked him, ‘Any preference as to where? Arm? Leg?’
He said, ‘It works best into muscle mass.’
‘So roll over.’
He rolled over and I shot him in the ass.
I reloaded the thing twice more and put darts into the two agents that were liable to wake up. Which gave me at least an eight-hour margin, unless there were other unanticipated arrivals on the horizon. Or unless the agents were supposed to call in with status checks every hour. Or unless there was a car already on its way to take us back to D.C. Which conflicting thoughts made me feel half relaxed and half urgent. I carried the pry bar through to the cell block. Jacob Mark looked at me and said nothing. Theresa Lee looked at me and said, ‘They sell shoes like that on Eighth Street now?’
I didn’t answer. Just stepped around to the back of her cell and jammed the flat end of the pry bar under the bottom of the structure. Then I leaned my weight on the bar and felt the whole thing move, just a little. Just a fraction of an inch. Not much more than the natural flex of the metal.
‘That’s stupid,’ Lee said. ‘This thing is a self-contained freestanding cube. You might be able to tip it over, but I’ll still be inside.’
I said, ‘Actually it’s not freestanding.’
‘It’s not bolted to the floor.’
‘But it’s clamped down by the sewer connection. Under the toilet.’
‘Will that help?’
‘I hope so. If I tip it up and the sewer connection holds, then the floor will tear off, and you can crawl out.’
‘Will it hold?’
‘It’s a gamble. It’s a kind of competition.’
‘Between what?’
‘Nineteenth-century legislation and a sleazy twenty-first-century welding shop with a government contract. See how the floor isn’t welded all the way around? Just in some places?’
‘That’s the nature of spot welding.’
‘How strong is it?’
‘Plenty strong. Stronger than the toilet pipe, probably.’
‘Maybe not. There was cholera in New York in the nineteenth century. A big epidemic. It killed lots of people. Eventually the city fathers figured out what was causing it, which was cesspools mixing with the drinking water. So they built proper sewers. And they specified all kinds of standards for the pipes and the connectors. Those standards are still in the building code, all these years later. A pipe like this has a flange lapping over the floor. I’m betting it’s fixed stronger than the spot welds. Those nineteenth-century public works guys erred on the side of caution. More so than some modern corporation wanting Homeland Security money.’
Lee paused a beat. Then she smiled, briefly. ‘So either I get illegally busted out of a government jail cell, or the sewer pipe gets torn out of the floor. Either way I’m in the shit.’
‘You got it.’
‘Great choice.’
‘Your call,’ I said.
‘Go for it.’
Two rooms away I heard a telephone start to ring.
I knelt down and eased the tip of the pry bar into the position it needed to be in, which was under the bottom horizontal rail of the cell, but not so far under that it also caught the edge of the floor tray. Then I kicked it sideways a little until it was directly below one of the upside-down T-welds, where the force would be carried upwards through one of the vertical bars.
Two rooms away the telephone stopped ringing.
I looked at Lee and said, ‘Stand on the toilet seat. Let’s give it all the help we can.’
She climbed up and balanced. I took up all the slack in the pry bar and then leaned down hard and bounced, once, twice, three times. Two hundred and fifty pounds of moving mass, multiplied by sixty inches of leverage. Three things happened. First, the pry bar dug itself a shallow channel in the concrete under the cage, which was mechanically inefficient. Second, the whole assemblage of bars distorted out of shape a little, which was also inefficient. But third, a bright bead of metal pinged loose and skittered away.
‘That was a spot,’ Lee called. ‘As in spot-weld.’
I moved the pry bar and found a similar position twelve inches lo the left. Wedged the bar tight, took up the slack, and bounced. Same three results. The grind of powdered concrete, the screech of bending bars, and the ping of another metal bead torn loose.
Two rooms away a second phone started to ring. A different lone. More urgent.
I stood back and caught my breath. Moved the pry bar again, this time two feet to the right. Repeated the procedure, and was rewarded with another broken weld. Three down, many more to go. But now I had approximate hand-holds in the bottom rail, where the pry bar had forced shallow U-shaped bends into the metal. I put the pry bar down and squatted facing the cell and shoved my hands palms-up into the holds. Grasped hard and breathed hard and prepared to lift. When I quit watching the Olympics the weightlifters were moving more than five hundred pounds. I figured I was capable of much less than that. But I figured much less than that might do the trick.
Two rooms away the second telephone stopped ringing.
And a third started.
I heaved upward.
I got the side of the cell about a foot off the ground. The tread plate floor shrieked and bent like paper. But the welds held. The third telephone stopped ringing. I looked up at Lee and mouthed, ‘Jump.’ She got the message. She was a smart woman. She jumped high off the toilet and smashed her bare feet down together right where two welds were under pressure. I felt nothing through my hands. No impact. No shock. Because the welds broke immediately and the floor bent down into a radical V-shaped chute. Like a mouth. The opening was about a foot wide and a foot deep. Good, but not good enough. A kid might have gotten through it, but Lee wasn’t going to.
But at least we had proved the principle. Score one for the nineteenth-century city fathers.
Two rooms away all three phones started to ring simultaneously. Competing tones, fast and urgent.
I caught my breath again and after that it was just a question of repeating the triple procedures over and over again, two welds at a time. The pry bar, the weightlifting, the jump. Lee wasn’t a big woman, but even so we needed to tear free a line of welds nearly six feet long before the floor would bend down enough to let her out. It was a question of simple arithmetic. The straight edge of the floor became part of a curved circumference, in a ratio of one to three against us. It took us a long time to get the job done. Close to eight minutes. But we got it done eventually. Lee came out on her back, feet first, like a limbo dancer. Her shirt got caught and rode up to reveal a smooth tan stomach. Then she wriggled free and crabbed clear and stood up and hugged me hard. And longer than she needed to. Then she broke away and I rested for a minute and wiped my hands on my pants.
Then I repeated the whole procedure all over again, for Jacob Mark.
Two rooms away phones rang and stopped, rang and stopped.
FORTY-SEVEN
