The Protector

5

This time, the blackness was so palpable that it seemed to squeeze them.

Jamie sounded as if she was having trouble getting enough air. Cavanaugh's legs were so unsteady, he wanted to lean against a wall and sink to the floor. He struggled to resist. "One thing's in our favor."

"I can't imagine what," Jamie said.

"They still didn't take our belts." His attempt at bravado failed as he felt his way into the room where they'd tried to hide. He brushed his shoes along the floor and found where he'd dropped his belt. "Give me the sleeves we tore from your blouse."

"What good will that do? Grace took your matches. We've got no way to set fire to the sleeves."

"Actually, there's another thing in our favor." Cavanaugh hoped he sounded confident. "I didn't give Grace all the matches." He removed one from his jacket and scraped it against the quarter-inch of abrasive paper.

Nothing happened.

Jesus, maybe I didn't tear off enough of the paper, he thought. Heart pounding, he tried it again, and this time the match flared, providing enough illumination for him to see the near panic on Jamie's face, which the faint light only partially alleviated.

She pulled the sleeves from her blazer pocket. He attached one to his belt buckle and put the match to it. As if it were the flickering of their lives, they watched the fabric start to burn.

"Thirsty," she said.

"Me, too. Something else to blame adrenaline for."

"My mouth's so dry… If only I could get a drink of water. If only they hadn't removed the plumbing fixtures."

Suddenly, even in the dim light, Cavanaugh saw Jamie's eyes flash as if she realized something.

"What?" he asked.

"Where would the bathroom have been?" She moved haltingly along the corridor.

Cavanaugh's buckle scraped, its echo emphasizing the dark closeness of their confinement as he pulled his belt and the burning cloth. "What are you thinking?" She told him.

"Maybe," he said. "We might be able to do it." "But it all depends on water," Jamie said. Desperate, they checked the rooms along the right side of the corridor, finally coming to the next-to-last room, where pipes projected from the walls, the vestiges of sinks and urinals that had been removed.

"Damn it, they're capped," Jamie said. "I hoped for valves that could be opened. This could've worked."

"It still can work." In the dwindling light from the burning sleeve, Cavanaugh studied a pipe that was bigger than the others. Its screw-on cap was square-shaped.

"But we don't have a wrench to loosen it!" "Take off your belt."

"What good will…" Even as Jamie questioned him, she took off her belt and gave it to him.

Thankful to have the distraction of doing something, Cavanaugh lit the end of Jamie's other sleeve, then used its light to examine her belt's double layers of leather, the grain on one strip going in the opposite direction from the other. "Let's see how strong this really is."

He put the tip of the belt through the buckle and made a noose. Then he slipped the noose over the square cap on the pipe and tightened the belt. When the leather firmly gripped it, he pulled on the belt, putting torque on the cap. The leather dug into his hands. His arms strained. His feet had trouble keeping a purchase on the floor.

The cap wouldn't budge.

Jamie grabbed the belt with him.

They pulled. The cap made a high-pitched sound, budging a little. They braced their feet, tugging, and suddenly leaned back as the cap twisted freely.

In a rush, Cavanaugh released the belt and used his hands to untwist the cap. He hoped water would start dripping, but even when the cap came fully away, the mouth of the pipe was dry.

"There's got to be a main water valve," Jamie said. "It's turned off where the water comes into the building."

Dragging the burning sleeve, Cavanaugh followed her to the shadows of the final room on the right.

"There!"

In what was evidently a gutted utility room, the flame revealed a large pipe that came up from the floor and connected to a network of smaller pipes leading into a wall. The main pipe had a valve. Jamie turned it, but even when it was opened as far as it would go, the pipe didn't vibrate with the flow of water. Nor was there any sound of splashing from the pipe they'd opened in the next room.

"The water's been turned off somewhere else." Cavanaugh pivoted frantically toward the wall behind him. The panel on an electrical breaker box had been removed. Except for a switch on the upper right, which presumably supplied power to the front entrance, all the other switches had been removed also. Various colored wires dangled.

"This place probably uses a well," Cavanaugh said. "Which needs a pump. But the water isn't flowing because the pump isn't getting electricity."

They shifted toward the wires and tried to figure out which went with which. A few moment's study made Cavanaugh suspect that the wires hung in vague pairs. Holding two wires by their rubber insulation, he joined their exposed tips. Nothing happened. He pressed another two together. Nothing.

Jamie desperately did the same. "How much time do we have left?"

"Less than fifteen minutes."

Shadows thickened as the flame weakened. Cavanaugh pressed another pair together and saw a spark when they connected. But the flow of electricity had no obvious effect on anything around him. He separated the wires but bent them back in such a way that he'd have no trouble finding them again.

"Faster," Jamie said. Her raspy breathing echoed. When Cavanaugh could barely see the wires he was trying to match, he took off his jacket and tore his shirt along its seams, the chill of the concrete making him shiver. After setting fire to a section of his shirt, he rushed back to the wires, only to hear something droning under the floor and water vibrating through the intake pipe.

"I did it," Jamie said. "I found the right pair." From down the hall, they heard water splashing out of the opened pipe in the bathroom.

Trying to control his emotions, Cavanaugh noticed an outline on the floor where a furnace had been. He focused on hooks projecting from the wall next to the breaker box. The hooks must have had something to do with supporting the furnace ducts, he realized.

Pressured by time, he returned his attention to the wires in the breaker box. "They've got to be longer."

Jamie pulled two wires from a gap in the wall, stretching them as far as they would go. She and Cavanaugh bent them back and forth rapidly to create enough friction to break them.

Meanwhile, the pump kept droning, spewing water from the pipes in the next room.

As Cavanaugh used his teeth to pull the insulation off the tips of each wire, the flame got smaller. Jamie attached another section from Cavanaugh's shirt and pulled the fire into the corridor. "I don't see any water on the floor," she said in alarm. They hurried toward the water splashing into the washroom and found that only the central part of the washroom's floor was covered with it.

"My God, there's a drain," Jamie said. She yanked off her blazer and pushed it onto the drain, trying to create a plug.

Cavanaugh left the burning cloth in the corridor and hurried in next to her, adding his jacket as well, pushing it onto the drain.

Tense, they watched the water collect. Feeling light-headed, Cavanaugh realized he was holding his breath.

The plug worked. The water began to spread. As it reached the entrance to the corridor, Cavanaugh got to the burning cloth and pulled it back to the utility room.

He heard a frenzied splashing sound and realized that Jamie was kicking water along the corridor, trying to make it spread as far and fast as possible. At the breaker box, he grabbed the wires that he'd bent back earlier, the ones that had made a spark. Keeping them separate, he extended them to their maximum length from the box and connected them to the wires that he and Jamie had taken from the gap in the wall, twisting them together.

The tips reached the floor.

Jamie's bare arms flashed in the light from the burning cloth as she appeared at the entrance to the utility room. "The water's spreading."

"We have to get it to here." He ran into the corridor with her and had just enough light to see that the murky floor was covered with a film of water. He helped kick it as far as it would go, guiding it toward the utility room.

Before it got there, he hurried back and raised the wires off the floor, keeping them separate, suspending them over the hooks next to the breaker box.

The water entered the utility room. "Jamie, get your belt."

Simultaneously, Cavanaugh separated the burning cloth from his belt and dipped its buckle in the approaching water, cooling the metal. He put the belt's tip through the buckle and cinched it, making a circle. Jamie did the same with hers. He looped his belt over a hook. So did Jamie.

As the water spread toward the burning cloth near them, they waited in silent tension for the light to be extinguished. Just before the fire made a hissing sound, in the last of the light, Cavanaugh separated the wires that controlled the water pump.

The underfloor droning stopped. So did the splashing. The flame went out.

Plunged into darkness again, they waited.

The chill of the water added to that of the concrete. Cavanaugh shivered harder now that his upper torso was completely exposed. In the blackness, he listened to Jamie's nervous breathing.

He tried to distract her. "When this is over, I'll have to teach you about neuro-linguistic programming."

"What's that?"

"A way of using language to control what you're thinking and feeling."

" 'When this is over'? You're doing it to me again, making me think we'll get out of this."

"We will get out of this." Cavanaugh hoped he sounded confident. "Visualize what's going to happen and what you need to do. Don't let yourself get surprised by something you haven't imagined."

"I'm visualizing sunlight."

"Which you'll see very soon."

"The future tense is wonderful."

"Isn't it, though."

A rumble from along the corridor indicated that the concrete door was being opened. The sound of numerous footsteps came down the steps, echoing along the corridor. Flashlights glared, high enough that they didn't reveal the film of water on the floor.

"I've brought your doctor," Grace said.

In the utility room, Cavanaugh and Jamie remained quiet.

"Where are you?" Grace demanded. No response.

"Where are you? Damn it, get out here! I warned you what would happen if you tried to hide."

No reply.

"Flash-bangs you want, flash-bangs you get," Grace said.

Fabric rustled. Cavanaugh guessed that the team was putting on ear protection. He felt for Jamie's hands, pressed them over her ears, then quickly protected his own ears. That would help against flash-bangs detonated a distance away, but if any were thrown into the utility room, the nonlethal concussions would be so great that hands over ears wouldn't relieve the agony.

In his imagination, Cavanaugh heard the clatter of a flash-bang hitting the floor of one of the rooms.

A muffled blast compressed the air around him. Reverberating off the concrete, the roar was something he felt as much as heard.

Another distant blast shook him.

And another, coming closer.

Cavanaugh pressed his hands harder against his ears. When yet another flash-bang detonated, Jamie leaned against him, trembling. The blasts were in rooms close enough that Cavanaugh could see the fierce glare-the flash of the immobilizing device-reflect off the corridor's walls. He assumed that Grace and her team were shielding their eyes.

The next roar was even closer. The flashlights revealed the shadows of men with submachine guns moving along the corridor. As much as Cavanaugh could tell, Grace and her team were at the water. Their earplugs would prevent them from hearing the faint splash of their footsteps, but any second now, they would look down and notice what they were standing in.

In fact, they already had. When another flash-bang didn't go off within the interval Cavanaugh expected, he eased his hands away from his ears.

"What's all this water?" Grace demanded. "Where the hell did it come from?"

Cavanaugh tapped Jamie's shoulder, feeling her respond to the signal they'd agreed on. She shoved an arm through where her belt was looped over the hook above her. Hanging, she lifted her shoes out of the water.

"Check these last two rooms," Grace ordered.

In a rush, Cavanaugh shoved his right arm through where his belt was looped over a hook. He raised his knees, hoisting himself off the water.

The next instant, he lifted the wires from the hook where they'd been suspended and dropped them into the water.

If this doesn't work … he thought.

He'd expected to see sparks when the wires struck the water, but he saw nothing and immediately knew that he and Jamie were doomed. I'm sorry, Jamie, he thought.

An eerie noise made him frown.

Uuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhh.

It came from the corridor. Low, wavering, guttural. Several similar sounds joined it.

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh.

Cavanaugh abruptly understood that he was hearing men groan as electricity shot through them. Crack. Bang. Then a clatter. Submachine guns dropped, echoing harshly. Flashlights fell, their glare rolling across the water-covered floor, their tight seals preventing them from taking in water and being extinguished.

Uuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

In the grotesque shadows created by the lights pointing along the floor, men collapsed, their silhouettes twitching in the water. The stuttering roar of a submachine gun tortured Cavanaugh's ears, but he couldn't cup his hands over them, had to keep his right arm through the belt, holding himself above the water. As the weapons kept firing, bullets ricocheted along the corridor. Men screamed. Cavanaugh couldn't tell if a gunman was aiming at an imagined threat or if the electricity jolting through the man had caused him to convulse, his finger squeezing the trigger. Empty cartridge casings hit the water, some jangling on top of one another. Then the submachine gun clicked on empty, and another loud clatter indicated that it, too, had fallen to the floor.

Uuuuuhhhhh.

The thrashing shadows in the corridor began to subside.

Uh.

The corridor became eerily quiet. Dangling by his right hand, Cavanaugh used his left to raise one of the wires from the water and twist it around the hook, interrupting the electrical circuit.

"Now," he told Jamie.