Public Enemy

49

Cooper identified what he assumed were most but not all of the video cameras monitoring his side of the mansion. There was also a roving patrol, two guys walking together around the outside of the house, plus a few Secret Service equivalents camped out near a pair of black Chevy Suburbans toward the front of the residence.

There were some weak points in the house’s design, mostly the sort related to the historical qualities of the home, including the lead casement windows they’d kept in order to maintain the authentic hacienda look. Still, having seen photographs of Márquez’s wine cellar-and working from the dread of his sixth sense on the certainty that a sequence of tunnels and rooms originally designed as a prison and torture chamber ran beneath his feet-Cooper decided now, as he had when he’d examined the images provided by Laramie’s guide, that the surest way in would be underground.

There were no electrical wires, television cables, or other utility connections visible on the exterior of the home. He looked for and found the mansion’s air-conditioner units, which they’d planted in a bed of bark chips alongside some tropical greenery. As he suspected, in a kind of garden of technology, it was in this bed of A/C units that the various utility meters were planted too. Another, larger utility box of some kind stood among the other measuring devices; initially at a loss, he was finally able to identify it as the head end of a cable connection, probably capable of distributing television service across a small city. He learned this by cracking open the lock and peering inside the panel door, where he found labels, printed in Spanish, for the various feeds and splits to forty-three televisions.

Salvadorans’ tax dollars, he thought, hard at work.

His theory hit paydirt upon his discovery of a rectangular equivalent of a manhole cover. It was nestled in the bark behind the various meter stands and boxes. With the aid of the knife he’d brought for any hand-to-hand encounters with the security staff, he got the heavy metal lid pried from its roost, exposing beneath a broad band of wires and pipes, held together by an oversize plastic strip of the sort used to secure extension cords and hoses.

The batch of utility connections stretched toward the house in its semi-organized, snaking fashion-running along the side of what looked more or less like a mining tunnel.

Cooper recognized the tunnel for what it was, those old ghosts whispering to him from its walls-there wouldn’t be any stains left, not anymore, but he figured it was a good bet that a great deal of blood had been spilled on the floors of these tunnels. If he went long enough without blinking, Cooper knew he’d start seeing the blooms of red, even if he was only imagining it.

He whipped out his Maglite and examined the edge of the access opening for sensors or any other sort of alarm. There was nothing on the rim of the opening itself, but he caught a glimpse of what looked like a motion detector built into the base of the tunnel near where he’d need to jump inside it.

He was deciding whether he ought to just plow a bullet into the motion detector when a bleating, two-tone alarm suddenly tore through the atmosphere, the pealing scream coming at him from all angles, so loud it seemed to be part of the air itself.

Lights as bright as those illuminating the emerald lawn chunked to life along the exterior of the house, bathing Cooper in sudden bright white. A second, piercingly high-pitched alarm began sounding out over the two-tone blare, all of it so loud it nearly peeled the surface from Cooper’s eardrums.

He didn’t think he’d set it off with his examination of the utility panel, but it didn’t matter-there wasn’t much choice on what to do now. He fired a pair of shells into the motion sensor at the base of the tunnel, grabbed the access panel, leaped into the hole, and pulled the heavy panel tight against its stops above as he dropped inside.

No doubt, he thought, the darkness of the subterranean tunnel overtaking him, they found one of the dead guards-good fucking plan you put together here.

He clicked on the flashlight and was greeted rudely by the illuminated image of an ancient door about five feet in front of him. The serpentine batch of utility cords disappeared through the doorway by way of a small, square brick of wood that had been cut from the door. The door was made of old wood and iron. It had a round, draping handle that looked like a knocker, along with a modern chain-and-padlock deal holding the door closed. The chain looped snugly around a pole built into the wall.

“Probably gonna hurt,” he said, brought his MP5 around, took aim at the older, rusted hinges on the side of the door opposite the padlock, and held the trigger down for ten or fifteen rounds’ worth of automatic weapons fire. He tried to do it in circles around the two hinges, but the muzzle flash blinded him and a couple of ricocheting shells nipped one shoulder and a thigh, so before he completed his intended lines of fire he was ducking, dropping the gun, and covering his head with his arms. When the sound of ricocheting bullets stopped echoing through his skull, he surveyed the door with his flashlight, flipped the rifle strap around to push the weapon to his back, lowered his head, and plowed his full bulk into the door.

The old door broke off its hinges with little resistance and Cooper went flying into the void beyond. Too late, he reconsidered what he’d just done and got quickly to replacing the door, standing it up to approximate its position before he’d mauled the thing. They’ll know I came in here now-at least as long as they’re good enough to open the panel and clock the busted-up door.

Maybe they won’t be that good.

On the other hand, maybe they will-he is their president.

That was when the claustrophobia hit.

One instant he was thinking rationally, contemplating his plan-and in the next he could no longer breathe, stand, or think. He fell first to one knee, then the next. He felt as though the weight of the ceiling had fallen on his chest, his lungs collapsing slowly, so that with each successive breath he was capable of bringing in less and less oxygen-until, like an asthmatic, he couldn’t find a single cubic inch of air to feed his failing chest. He pushed his hands out against the walls, trying to convince his brain there was plenty of room-plenty of air-but he only felt the walls shrinking in on him. Sweat burst suddenly from his pores, a lukewarm, salty sprinkler sprung to life in a flash of heat.

He wanted to scream, Fuck! but he couldn’t. He wanted to hear himself say, It’s not real! You’re losing your fucking mind! But he couldn’t.

Get up and go now, he heard from some lesser-traumatized corner of his brain, while you still have the chance. You have to find a place to hide-your past, or the ghosts of these tunnels, or both, are taking away your mind. You’d better get yourself someplace where nobody can find the intruder curled up against the wall in a fetal position, and you’d better do it now.

He started out on his knees, then rose to one foot, then both, moving deeper into the shrinking tunnel one slow-motion step at a time, unable to breathe-his vision blurry from the sweat dripping into his eyes. He felt as though he had dived into molasses, but he kept on, and in twenty paces came to another door. This door was closed, but not padlocked. He struggled, arms beginning to weaken, but he got it open and a junction of tunnels presented itself to him. He attempted to determine the direction that would take him farthest from the house, and took it.

He lost all focus and impression for the remainder of his meandering journey, Cooper’s return to the hell of his past blunted by his accelerating phobias and post-traumatic-stress attack. He didn’t know how long it took him, only that he got himself somewhere deep in the labyrinth before deciding almost by default on a hiding place. Unable to fend off the leaking pores, failing lungs, and ringing headache, his weakened mind turned in on itself and he fell to the floor, a sweating, heaving potato sack. He pulled his legs under his arms and lay there, trying to keep warm but caught in a cold-shiver loop of the sort he regularly endured in the course of his recurring nightmares.

He slipped from consciousness, unable even to find a sense of relief.