The World Beneath

Chapter 35

After more than an hour of walking and doubling back to avoid transit cops, Joe was finally closing in on his own house. He’d never expected it to take so long, but the tunnels were crawling with patrols. One of them even had a dog, reminding him again that he didn’t.

As much as he wanted to open a round steel door and walk down the hall to his front door, he didn’t dare. If the police hadn’t breached his alarm system, they were certainly monitoring it. He wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t someone in his house right now, sitting in his warm parlor, drinking his coffee and pawing through his leather-bound books.

But he still thought that they didn’t know about his secret passageway. If they’d known of its existence when they’d come to arrest him, they would have stationed someone there before they’d come down the elevator. Sure, they might have learned about it since then, but he doubted it. Probably, only the Gallos knew of its existence, and they hadn’t even told Joe its whereabouts.

He circled the area by the western-most armed door. No one. That made sense. It’d be easier to station someone on the other side. He checked neighboring tunnels — also empty.

He listened for a long time and didn’t hear anyone nearby. He almost turned to tell Edison to heel. No need.

Donning his night-vision goggles, he glanced around the dark tunnel intersection. Nothing moving in any direction. The patrols all used flashlights, and he’d see them coming from far away.

He crept slowly down the tunnel that led to his hidden door, stepping on the ties so as not to leave footprints. Here of all places he did not want to be followed. So close now.

The secret passageway ended in the middle of a tunnel, about four feet off the floor, with the door cleverly concealed by the stone. If he hadn’t known exactly where to look, he would have walked by it.

As it was, he went straight to it, felt about until he found the divot that was used as a handle, and pulled it open. It swung easily, silently, on hinges that he’d oiled himself right after he’d found the door. Even someone standing next to him would not have heard it.

He ran his fingers along the rubber seal that lined the edges. The door had been designed to be watertight in case the underground tunnels ever flooded. Nor would light leak out. He’d tested it by leaving a strong flashlight pointed at the door, then closed it and studied it with his night-vision goggles. Not a shimmer had passed through.

He climbed in and pulled the door closed behind him, carefully drawing the bolt across. Right now he was the safest he had been since the police had driven him out of his house the night before. He was also hungry, smelly, and lonely. But he had the cure to all that in his backpack — his computer.

Wedging himself with his back against one side of the round tunnel and his feet against the other, he started up his laptop. As a supernerd, Joe didn’t tolerate network lag. He had a router downstairs in the parlor and one upstairs in his bedroom on the bookcase that served as the interior door to the secret passage.

Wi-Fi strength should not be a problem here. Quickly, he connected and accessed his surveillance cameras. Nobody was at the elevator or in the tunnels right now. Unfortunately, he hadn’t installed cameras inside his house, so he couldn’t verify that it was empty. He bet that it wasn’t.

To find that out, he needed to track movements in and out of the house since he’d been driven out of the house the night before. He connected to the server that stored the surveillance videos and loaded the corresponding one. Four men (green) had left in the elevator late last night, about half an hour after their arrival. Vivian Torres had gone with them. Two (blue) men had stayed.

Every half hour the two men went through his front door. One went down the left tunnel to check the elevator and the door that closed off the tunnel in that direction. The other went right and checked that door. They must have assumed that the only way into the house was through one of those tunnels, because they didn’t bother to leave someone inside. Each check took them between five and six minutes.

Eight hours later, they had been relieved by another two men who followed the same routine. Eight hours after that, another two men came on shift. It looked like they’d settled in to stake out his house for the long term.

He’d been afraid of that. That left him only the five- to six-minute window when they went out to check the tunnel doors and the elevator. If he was quick and careful, that ought to be enough.

A glance at his watch verified that the men wouldn’t be going out on their foray any time soon. No point in wasting the free Wi-Fi. He left the surveillance camera views up on his laptop, hid his IP address, then searched for toxoplasmosis.

The first site brought up a cross section of a human brain with bright yellow dots in it and arrows pointing to the marked cysts.

He read the text below it.

So, Rebar having toxoplasmosis might be unremarkable. Millions of other people had it, and they hadn’t been targeted by a contract killer. Joe checked the time at the corner of the screen. Twenty more minutes before his guards left the house. He kept searching.

He remembered when he’d met Rebar in the tunnel. The man had been flushed, thin, and feverish-looking. Toxoplasmosis could have caused that. Not in someone with a healthy immune system, but toxoplasmosis could be deadly in those with compromised immune systems, such as those infected with HIV, organ transplant recipients, or the elderly.

He hadn’t seen AIDS or HIV mentioned in the autopsy or any mention that Rebar might have received an organ transplant or chemotherapy, so his immune system might or might not have been compromised. But maybe the parasite didn’t need a compromised immune system to take over anymore. Maybe the parasite had become more virulent.

Joe researched it further.

Joe read that paragraph twice. He grimaced. If a microscopic parasite could persuade rats to run willingly to their deaths, what could it do to humans?

A microscopic parasite could have a very profound influence on a person’s brain. A seemingly trivial creature could cause someone to hear voices, be depressed, or even take his own life. Feeling paranoid, he checked for a link between agoraphobia and toxoplasmosis, but didn’t find one. So, whatever had sent him over the deep end, it wasn’t this tiny parasite. Although that didn’t mean it couldn’t be a different one.

He did a quick search to see how it was transmitted — to make sure that he couldn’t have caught it from Rebar.

He hadn’t eaten Rebar or come in contact with his blood, so maybe he was safe. Joe took a deep breath and let it out. He was likely not infected by a killer parasite that made you do crazy things. That might be the best news he’d heard today. He checked the time. Five more minutes.

What about Saddiq? Unless he’d worn a full CDC contamination suit to bash in Rebar’s head, he’d probably come in contact with Rebar’s blood. If it had come in contact with an open wound or his eyes, there was a chance that he’d become infected, too.

It would explain his reckless behavior — killing Brandon in the street, randomly shooting his gun empty in the steam tunnel. None of his actions jibed with the deliberate, professional man described in his military files.

It made him an even more dangerous opponent.

Joe checked the time. 10:45. He crawled up the tunnel, laptop tucked inside his hoodie. When he got to the top, just inside the door that led to the house, he opened his laptop and checked his surveillance cameras. His watchdogs were leaving — one was fat with straight black hair and the other was skinny with big ears. He named them Abbott and Costello. Abbott went right, Costello went left, and Joe set his watch alarm for four minutes. That gave him a minute of cushion in case Abbott or Costello decided to speed things up.

He pushed the bookcase open slowly, glad that he’d oiled those hinges, too. His bedroom smelled wonderful — like wood and lilacs, remnants of the previous occupants and a reminder of his everyday world.

There was no way around it. He had to take risks now.

He ran down his stairs two at a time and went straight for the kitchen. Here, he gathered food: bottled water, Dr Pepper, MoonPies, trail mix, an unopened block of cheese from the fridge, and a bag of tortilla chips. He didn’t have time to be choosy — he just grabbed whatever was at the back of the cabinets and unlikely to be missed.

Then he raced back upstairs to the master bedroom. He took a set of clean clothes from his drawers — black jeans, a black T-shirt, and a black hoodie, clothes that would be hard to see in the tunnels. He threw everything into the passageway and went back to his bathroom. Two minutes. He stripped off his clothes, but didn’t put them in the hamper — the smell might get noticed.

Instead, he wet a washcloth with cold water — no time to warm it up — and took the fastest sponge bath in history. Then he brushed his teeth, opening a new toothbrush and taking that and the toothpaste with him. He dried everything off with a towel and took the dirty washcloth, towel, and wet soap with him, opening a new one and leaving it in its place.

He grabbed gauze and ointment for his ankle, and had just bent to look at it when his alarm beeped. Time’s up.

He made it back to the bookcase with five seconds to spare, but even so, he heard steps on his front porch. A short round for Abbott and Costello.

He climbed into the tunnel, closed the bookcase door, and realized that he hadn’t had time to dress. Stifling a curse, he fumbled around in the dark for his clean clothes. He hadn’t checked the bookcase to see if light leaked through, so he couldn’t turn on his flashlight.

It took longer than it should have, and he was thoroughly chilled by the time he was done, but eventually he was dressed in his new clothes and Andres’s long coat. He packed everything he’d taken from the house into his old hoodie and dragged it down to the stone door that opened onto the tunnel.

He turned on his flashlight and studied his scraped ankle. It looked worse than he’d expected. He didn’t like the way that the skin around the wound was red and hot to the touch. The wound itself was deeper than he’d thought, and rust flakes were embedded in it. Clenching his jaw against the pain, he scrubbed the flakes out with the wet washcloth. He covered the throbbing wound carefully with ointment and wrapped the gauze around his ankle, wishing that he’d had a better first aid kit with him when Edison was shot. Then he leaned his back against the wall, hoping that the pain would subside and that the ointment would be enough to fight off infection.

Eventually, he gave up on the pain going away and had an impromptu dinner, repacked his backpack, and settled down for the night.

His ankle throbbed, the rocks were rough, and it was cold. Andres’s coat gave him a little protection, but it was still uncomfortable. He missed Edison’s warm body and steady presence. Hopefully, the dog was OK. Hopefully, he was out of the vet’s office with a couple of stitches and was eating steak at the foot of Celeste’s bed.

With or without Edison, he had one more clue to follow up. When Saddiq had spotted him in the tunnel just after he’d left the crime scene, he’d had asked if Rebar had given him documents. That meant that the documents were important, and Saddiq didn’t have them.

Joe shifted the old hoodie into a more comfortable position as his pillow and stared into the dark.

Rebar hadn’t given those documents to Joe as Saddiq had assumed. But Rebar had possessed them — Joe had seen them in his pockets when he’d been breaking the hole into the wall.

If those documents had disappeared by the time he’d been killed, Rebar had hidden them himself. He hadn’t had much time, so they must be close to the bricked-in presidential train car. If Rebar had hidden them in the car or the room itself, the police would have found them, and they would, presumably, have pointed to other suspects in Rebar’s death besides Joe. That meant that they had been hidden somewhere else.

In the tunnels.

Joe pulled Andres’s coat up under his chin. Tomorrow, he would find those papers.

Maybe they held the key to set him free.