The World Beneath

Chapter 37

Joe woke up feeling worse than he had the day before. His back was in open rebellion. He’d slept outside on the ground often as a kid, but clearly his back was too old to put up with that kind of nonsense anymore. Stifling a groan, he sat up and promptly cracked his head against the roof of the tunnel. He felt like he’d barely slept at all.

Every hour or so throughout the night he’d woken up reaching for Edison, remembering each time with a lurch that the dog was gone. He didn’t even know if his best friend was dead or alive. Alive. Edison had to be alive.

He checked the time on his computer. Too early, but he wasn’t going back to sleep. The best plan was to give up, have breakfast, and figure out where Rebar had hidden those papers. Maybe then he could put the pieces together and show the finished puzzle to the police. His life would go back to normal. Or as normal as it got these days.

Rifling through his food supplies, he came up with a MoonPie and a can of Dr Pepper for breakfast. Celeste, a vegetarian who only ate organic, would have been appalled. Although, technically speaking, the chocolate-covered marshmallow pie was vegetarian, and so was the Dr Pepper. He raised them both in an imaginary toast to her, and thanked her silently for taking in his dog.

After he finished his healthy breakfast, he packed most of his food back into the hoodie and stashed it up in the tunnel. The packet of trail mix and a bottle of water went into his backpack. That should get him through the day and, with luck, he could come back here tomorrow for refills. But he couldn’t hide here forever.

Now, to work. First, he checked the surveillance cameras. Nothing new on them — Abbott and Costello had performed their regular tunnel checks all night long — but, around eight p.m., Vivian had showed up.

Abbott must have seen the red light, because he’d hustled out to meet her at the bottom of the elevator, gun drawn. She’d stepped out, hands in the air, and had a long, animated discussion with Abbott, who had finally let her into Joe’s house. He wished that he had audio to hear what they had talked about. But he didn’t, and without cameras inside the house, he had no idea what she’d done in there. What she hadn’t done yet was leave.

She knew that he must have a secret exit, because he’d escaped while she’d stalled the cops and CIA agents sent to apprehend him. Had she told someone? He shuddered. At least she hadn’t done so last night. If they’d found his hideout, they would have pulled him out, and they hadn’t.

Instead, they’d sat around inside his house, cozy and warm, sleeping on his bed for all he knew, while he was consigned to the cold rocky tunnel. It was starting to piss him off.

Keeping the window with the surveillance video running, he opened the video he’d taken of the murder scene. As he remembered, no papers were in Rebar’s pockets, and Saddiq had asked Joe if he had “documents,” which meant that Saddiq didn’t have them then either.

So, Rebar had been in possession of those papers when Joe had met him at around four in the morning, but he hadn’t had them by the time Joe had found his body at 5:30 or so. He’d hidden the papers, searched the car, and been murdered, all in an hour and a half.

The logic still held.

All Joe had to do was find those documents. The car itself and the brick room were out. If he had hidden them there, it seemed likely that Saddiq would have found them. He was a thorough guy, and he’d clearly been interested in them. Even if he hadn’t found them, the police would have, which meant that if they’d been there, they were gone now.

There was an access tunnel that led to the street a few hundred yards from the railroad car, but Joe didn’t think Rebar would have gone up there and, if he had, Joe certainly wasn’t going to follow in his footsteps. The most likely hiding place was in the tunnels themselves. It was dark, and no one ever came down there — it was perfect. Even something as big as the train car had stayed hidden for seventy years.

He had to think like Rebar. He had been ex-military. He had been ill. He had not introduced himself by his real name, but as Rebar and as Subject 523. Rebar sounded like a street nickname — most of the homeless guys Joe had met had one. Subject 523 was a different thing entirely. That sounded like a specific identifier, as if he were part of an experimental group, maybe something down in Cuba that had caused him to go AWOL in the first place. Maybe something related to the toxoplasmosis.

Joe brought up surveillance video of Rebar entering the concourse and climbing over the end of Platform 23 (blue, red). Twenty-three again. Maybe a coincidence, but maybe not.

He went back to the video he’d shot of the murder scene, hoping he’d filmed footprints. Rebar’s big boots had tramped all over the inside of the brick room. Joe was glad he’d done that quick panorama outside. He identified Rebar’s prints once coming, heading away toward the tracks that led north to south, unused nowadays, and then coming back.

It was a place to start.

Joe slipped on Andres’s coat and his backpack and pulled back the bolt that held the tunnel door closed. If someone happened to be passing by or looking, he was caught. He swung it open just wide enough to fit through and dropped to the ground, landing with a scuffing sound.

The tunnel around him was empty and dark. He didn’t dare turn on a flashlight, so he donned his night-vision goggles. He hated to do it, as anyone with a flashlight could blind him, but he’d never find his way through the dark tunnel without them, not without Edison. He missed the yellow dog.

Joe made it all the way back to the murder scene without seeing another soul. Maybe the patrols had gone home for the night. Or maybe they were due back any second. Moving stealthily, he hurried to the tracks that Rebar had stepped onto the night he was killed.

He glanced back toward the open area behind him, full of track. Rebar wouldn’t have hidden anything there — trains were constantly moving through there. No privacy. If he hadn’t chosen the car, then maybe he’d chosen the abandoned tunnel next to it. No one was likely to go down there.

He’d search it inch by inch if he had to, but Joe had a theory about where Rebar might have hidden those papers. Rebar was a counter, just like Joe. And he had been obsessed with the number 523. He hurried down the tunnel, counting each tie as he stepped on it. Cyan, blue, red, green, brown, orange, slate, purple, scarlet, and cyan plus black for ten. He crept along, keeping track of each number, head swiveling around, hoping that the night-vision goggles would let him pick out the hiding place.

When he reached five hundred and twenty three (brown, blue, red), he stopped. There was nothing obvious here, but just ahead was a dark mound. He hurried over. The track had been ripped up beyond this point, and the ties had been piled in an untidy stack. It was the perfect place to hide something. Who would ever think to look here?

Joe would.

He looked back down the tunnel for a trace of moving light, like from a flashlight, but saw nothing. It was as safe as it was going to get. He tipped up the goggles and risked using his flashlight. Several minutes of careful digging, which was louder than he would have liked, produced a flat briefcase. It had been fine leather once, but now the surface was cracked. The hinges were broken and someone, probably Rebar, had tied it together with a belt.

Joe tucked it into his backpack. He itched to open it, but it wasn’t safe here. The police patrolling the tunnels might be back at any second. They might have heard the noise that he’d made moving the train ties and be on their way to him right now. He had to get to a safe place.

He turned off his flashlight, put on the goggles, and jogged back the way he’d come, wishing that a tunnel branched off, but none did. He reached the brick room without incident, but when he looked off to the side, he saw a couple of men heading across the wide tunnel where the tracks converged — where he liked to play fetch with Edison.

He ducked back inside the dark tunnel and waited.

The men got so close that he could hear them talking. Not exactly stealthy.

“How are we supposed to find him? There’s miles of tunnels down here, assuming he didn’t just get on a private helicopter and fly to Canada,” said a man with a gravelly voice. He sounded as if it had taken fifty years of smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky to perfect that growl.

“He’s a nut,” the other man said. “Can’t go outside, my ass.”

“I bet he could if he was properly motivated, like by having the whole damn tunnel system crawling with cops.”

Joe wished that were true.

Their voices grew louder. Joe shrank back against the tunnel wall. He didn’t dare retreat farther for fear of making a sound.

“I say leave him until we get another superstorm to wash him out,” said Gravel Voice. “My feet hurt.”

“He might’ve killed Officer Chin.”

“Or Chin might’ve fallen in front of that train.”

The other man grunted.

“Either way,” said Gravel Voice, “I say we shoot first, so we don’t have to chase him.”

“Amen to that, brother.”

The voices moved closer. Joe held his breath. If they saw him, he wouldn’t be able to get away. He was trapped.