The Joshua Stone

by James Barney

  “Move in now!” yelled Vladamir Krupnov into his small walkie-talkie. From his vantage point in the rear upper balcony, he watched as five of his Ukrainian goons burst into the sanctuary from all directions. All of these men were wearing tracksuits and black ski masks, and carrying compact Uzi machine guns.

  The man and the woman behind the pulpit were already on the move, having heard the commotion in the balcony a few seconds earlier. “This way,” said the elderly woman in white. She and Malachi darted to an adjacent doorway and quickly disappeared.

  Krupnov grimaced as he watched the pair disappearing through the doorway. Malachi must not escape! He was just about to bark another order into his walkie-talkie when a sound-suppressed gunshot suddenly punctured the air to his right. In the same instant, he saw one of his men in the sanctuary stumble and hit the floor.

  Goddamnit! Krupnov seethed. He immediately spotted the source of the gunshot. It was a blond woman in the side balcony to his right. And she was preparing to fire again. Before she could, Krupnov hoisted his Uzi and unleashed a firestorm of bullets in her direction. “Chertovsky suka!” he screamed. Fucking bitch! The woman in the balcony immediately went down and disappeared from view.

  “You all right?” whispered Mike Califano into his microphone after the machine-gun fire had subsided. He was crouching low behind the wall of his own balcony.

  No response.

  Shit. Still ducking low, Califano scrambled to the balcony doorway and burst out into the landing outside. With his pistol raised, he quickly scanned the darkened stairs in both directions. It appeared to be clear. “Ana, you okay?” he repeated into his microphone, louder this time. Seconds ticked by with no response.

  Finally, the voice of Ana Thorne crackled in his ear. “I’m fine,” she said in a strained voice.

  “You hit?”

  “No. Just got the wind knocked out of me.”

  Califano breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God. He tapped his transmit button again. “They went through a door at the front of the sanctuary. Right side if you’re facing the pulpit.”

  “Got it,” said Ana. “Bill, can you help us out with the layout of this place?”

  Bill McCreary’s voice came on the line a second later. “Oh, so you can hear me,” he said in an exasperated tone.

  “Yeah, Bill. We can hear you,” whispered Ana. “It’s been a little busy here, okay? How about that layout?”

  Back at CIA headquarters, McCreary was still pulling up the original architectural drawings of the iconic church on his computer screen. “Give me a second.”

  “We don’t have a second,” Ana whispered emphatically.

  As luck would have it, the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, at Sixteenth and K, had been the subject of a lengthy and contentious legal battle concerning its status as a historic landmark. The owners of the church and the congregation itself wanted the structure torn down and replaced with something more “churchlike.” The District of Columbia, however, insisted that the building was historical and wanted it preserved as an exemplar of the short-lived Brutalist movement in the city. To the surprise of nobody, the district won. As a result of this legal skirmish, the building’s exterior and interior designs were now well documented and permanently preserved.

  Strange that the government would want to preserve such an eyesore, McCreary thought as he finally got the right architectural drawing on his screen. “Okay,” he said over the secure radio network. “The door to the right of the pulpit, as you’re facing it, leads to a small vestibule, about eight by twelve feet. On the other side of that, through a doorway, is a midlevel landing with two sets of stairs. One set leads down to a hallway that connects to the front lobby on the east side of the building, where you guys probably came in. The other set leads up to the back of the sanctuary.”

  “How many exits are there?” asked Califano.

  “Uh . . . three. The main entrance is on the east side. There’s a delivery entrance on the I Street side, and a fire exit on the west side, which goes into that alley where Ana was earlier.”

  Where I almost got killed, Ana thought.

  “Those dudes are gonna have all those exits covered,” said Califano.

  “Yeah,” said Ana. “But I think that old lady knows another way out.”

  “What makes you so sure?” asked Califano.

  “Woman’s intuition.” As Ana spoke, she slipped carefully through the door of her balcony and quickly scanned the stairs in both directions. There were stairs going up to her right, which angled clockwise and disappeared. And there were stairs going down to her left, angling counterclockwise toward the lobby. “Jesus,” she whispered into her microphone. “This place reminds me of one of those crazy Escher drawings.”

  “I know,” said Califano. “Stairs everywhere.”

  “Okay, here’s the plan,” whispered Ana. “Mike, you head upstairs toward the back of the sanctuary. Be careful, though. The shooter may still be up there. I’ll head downstairs to the lobby. I think I know where they’re heading.”

  “On my way,” said Califano.

  “Be careful, guys,” McCreary said nervously.

  “Where are we going?” whispered Malachi.

  “This way,” urged the elderly woman in white who called herself Opal. She was moving surprisingly fast for a woman her age. With Malachi in tow, she headed straight upstairs, banked right into a hallway, then walked quickly toward the main lobby. As she neared the lobby, she spotted a man in a black ski mask about thirty feet away, patrolling the front door with a machine gun. Apparently, he had not seen them yet. She took two more careful steps in that direction, then quickly darted left into a darkened doorway. Malachi followed her through the doorway and disappeared.

  Mike Califano climbed the angular stairs toward the back of the church. With each forty-five-degree turn of the stairwell, the shadows and indirect lighting shifted dramatically, creating a bewildering “fun house” effect. As he ascended these steps, a troubling thought began easing into his brain. Why am I heading up?

  Califano stopped in his tracks. To hell with woman’s intuition. He had his own intuition, namely that nobody trying to escape a building ever runs up. Without a second thought, he reversed direction and began descending the stairs. Fuck protocol.

  “Keep going,” said the elderly woman in white. “It’s a long way down.” Malachi nodded and continued descending the narrow cement stairs in the dank stairwell, which was dimly lit with incandescent bulbs at each landing. Opal followed close behind him.

  “What is this place?” Malachi asked over his shoulder.

  “It’s a parking garage.”

  Malachi paused at the landing for level 2. “Keep going?”

  “Yes,” said Opal. “Down one more.”

  Fifteen seconds later, they exited into a vacant parking deck, forty feet below the octagonal church. The space was sparsely lit by overhead fluorescent bulbs, several of which were flickering badly. The cavernous parking deck was entirely empty and eerily quiet, like a tomb.

  “Shhh,” said Opal. “Did you hear that?”

  Malachi nodded. He could hear faint footsteps in the stairwell behind them. He quickly pulled his pistol from his coat pocket.

  Opal eyed the weapon disapprovingly and shook her head. “Violence is not the answer, Daniel.”

  Malachi stared blankly, unsure of how to respond.

  “If it comes to that, your weapon will be useless anyway. Put it away.”

  Malachi reluctantly complied.

  “This way,” said Opal, motioning emphatically toward a metal door nearby, which was prominently marked with the yellow-and-black symbol for a fallout shelter—three yellow triangles embedded in a black circle. She quickly made her way to the door and punched an access code into a small keypad on the wall next to it. The metal door immediately clicked open and the two of them slipped through and entered a dark stairwell. “Leave the door open so we can see,” she said. Then she carefully led Malachi down one more flig
ht of stairs, around a corner, and into a wide, nearly pitch-black space.

  Malachi strained to see into the darkness. The flickering fluorescent lighting that bled through the open doorway provided just enough illumination that he could tell there were concrete walls and a concrete floor. He could also make out the shapes of desks and consoles and other structures clustered together in groups, extending far into the darkness. “What is this place?” he whispered.

  Opal paused. “This is the reason the government won’t let the congregation build a new church on this site. Until about twelve years ago, this was the official nuclear fallout shelter for the White House. There’s a passageway on the other side that connects directly to the basement of the west wing. Or at least there used to be. It’s sealed shut now.”

  “But . . . how do you have access?”

  The woman laughed softly. “Honey, I designed this place.”

  “Hey, boss?” said Steve Goodwin, who was seated at his computer in the DTAI workroom at the CIA.

  “Yeah?” said McCreary.

  “Did you say there were three exits in that building?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, I just got another translation from our language people. Looks like those Ukrainians are covering four exits.”

  “Huh?” McCreary’s heart skipped a beat as he looked up from his computer terminal. “Where’s the fourth exit?”

  Goodwin carefully studied the translation on the screen. “Uh . . . it’s the service entrance at the back of the Hay-Adams hotel at Sixteenth and H.”

  “What the—” McCreary immediately swiveled in his chair and began typing furiously on his keyboard. Two minutes later, his screen was full of top-secret information about the fallout shelter beneath the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, and the secret passageway that ran deep beneath Sixteenth Street, connecting the White House to the Brutalist octagonal church, with an intermediate escape point behind the Hay-Adams hotel. “I can’t believe I missed this,” he said, shaking his head. He quickly pressed transmit on his microphone. “Ana? Mike?”

  No response.

  “If you guys can hear me, there’s a tunnel beneath the church that runs along Sixteenth Street toward the White House. There’s an access point behind the Hay-Adams. And somehow these Ukrainian guys know all about it.”

  38

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Ana Thorne could no longer hear anything in her earpiece. She was twenty feet beneath the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, on the first level of the building’s underground parking garage. With her Glock at the ready, she quickly canvassed the space. Two cars were parked along the east wall, near the stairwell. She presumed one of them belonged to the church lady in the blue dress, whom she’d noticed dropping her car keys into her purse earlier this morning. Other than that, the garage was entirely empty. And quiet.

  On the north wall, about twenty yards away, Ana spotted an overhead sectional door, about twice the size of a residential garage door. She assumed this was the connection to the building next door, which she knew would be the only way for vehicles to get in and out of here. She studied the door carefully. Did they escape through there? Overhead doors like that typically opened and closed very slowly. Plus, they were designed to stay open for fifteen or twenty seconds after a vehicle passed through. She shook her head and quickly dismissed the idea. The timing just didn’t work. If the woman and man had gone through that door, it would still be open.

  They must have gone somewhere else.

  Frustrated, Ana retreated to the stairwell and began climbing back toward the main level of the church. A second later, she stopped. Shuffling feet and voices could now be heard overhead. Someone was coming down . . . and fast. Ana quickly backtracked to the parking platform and ducked behind one of the two parked cars. The voices were growing louder.

  “Kudy vony pijshly?” she heard a man’s voice say.

  “Tudy,” said another.

  Moments later, Ana saw two goons with ski masks and machine guns rounding the corner of the stairwell. They were moving fast and breathing hard. They rounded the corner at the first level and continued descending toward the lower levels of the garage without even pausing.

  Ana cocked her head in confusion. What do they know that I don’t? When the men were safely out of view, she quickly looked around and spotted the vehicle ramp that descended to the next level. That would be the long way down, she realized. But at least she wouldn’t risk being heard in the stairwell, which was like an echo chamber.

  She immediately began sprinting toward the ramp.

  “Where the hell is it?” said Mike Califano into his microphone as he made his way south along Sixteenth Street toward the Hay-Adams hotel. Two blocks behind him, a dead Ukrainian thug with a bullet in his head marked the spot where Califano had escaped from the octagonal church a few minutes earlier, through the fire door in the alleyway.

  “It’s in the back,” said McCreary over the radio. “Between the hotel and the chamber of commerce building. Look for an alley that runs along the north side of the hotel.”

  “Okay, I see it,” said Califano. He quickly crossed over Sixteenth Street and made his way down the narrow alley until he reached a patch of asphalt behind the Hay-Adams hotel. The area was lined with Dumpsters and linen carts and was entirely enclosed by walls except for the alley entrance, which was just wide enough for small delivery trucks to come in and out.

  “What exactly am I looking for?” Califano whispered as he scanned the area.

  “Probably a metal cover of some sort on the ground,” McCreary replied over the radio. “It might look like a cellar door or a hatch.”

  “Hold on.” Califano terminated the transmission and stood still for a moment, trying to discern the direction of a metallic noise he’d just heard. It sounded like it had come from behind one of the Dumpsters. That’s when he noticed that one Dumpster was angled sharply away from the wall, unlike the others. He unholstered his noise-suppressed pistol and stepped cautiously toward the askew Dumpster until his shoulder was pressed tightly against it. He could hear a metallic grinding noise on the other side, and periodic grunts. What the hell is that?

  Califano inched along the side the Dumpster until he was at the corner. Then, in one swift motion, he turned and leveled his weapon at a man who was hunched over a metal access hatch on the ground, apparently trying to pry it open with a crowbar. “Freeze!” he ordered.

  The man with the crowbar was clearly startled. He stood with the crowbar in one hand and a stupefied expression on his face. He was a large man, with a massive jaw and a crooked nose. He was dressed in blue pants, a dungaree shirt, and a blue jacket with the Hay-Adams logo embroidered on one side.

  “What are you doing here?” Califano demanded.

  The big man spoke with a slight Slavic accent. “I was told to get hatch open. I . . . I work for hotel.”

  Califano wasn’t convinced. But he certainly wasn’t going to shoot a man who might be telling the truth. He was still considering his options when a crackling noise suddenly emanated from the man’s shirt pocket. It was a walkie-talkie.

  “Nomeru try, chy htos vyjshov?” said a man’s voice over the walkie-talkie.

  Califano immediately trained his pistol at the man’s head. “Drop the crowbar.”

  In an instant, the Ukrainian man swung the crowbar at Califano’s head like a baseball bat. Califano fired his weapon and ducked as the crowbar whizzed an inch over his head. The bullet ricocheted off a brick wall behind the Dumpster. When Califano looked up, the man was nearly on top of him, swinging the crowbar straight down toward his face.

  Califano dove to his left but could not escape the crowbar as it landed hard on his right shoulder, sending an excruciating burst of pain all through his body and causing him to lose his grip on his pistol. The Glock went skittering across the asphalt.

  Califano scampered away on hands and feet, unable to regain his full balance. He turned and fell backward as the Ukrainian barrele
d toward him with the heavy crowbar raised high over his head. “Zgin vybludok!” the brute shouted through gritted teeth.

  Califano had no idea what that meant, but it didn’t sound good. A second later, the man brought the crowbar crashing down toward Califano’s head. Califano rolled away and the crowbar clanked violently against the asphalt near his ear.

  Califano gained his feet and had just enough time to turn and see the Ukrainian charging toward him again at full speed, grunting like an animal. Instinctively, Califano lowered his stance and tackled the man around the waist, exploding upward at just the right moment to send the Ukrainian somersaulting over his head. As the man flew through the air behind him, Califano searched frantically for his weapon, which he spotted near the Dumpster. He lunged for it and quickly scooped it off the ground.

  With his gun now gripped in his hand, Califano spun to see a crowbar swinging viciously toward his face. He arched back and allowed the crowbar to fan harmlessly past his nose. In the next instant, he raised his firing arm and pulled the trigger. A suppressed shot split the air, and the big man instantly lurched backward with a wound in his chest. Califano fired another round, and the man stumbled backward again into the Dumpster, dropping the crowbar to the ground with a clank.

  Califano moved in for a final shot. But he saw it wouldn’t be necessary. The man’s eyes were bulging out, and blood was dribbling from his mouth. A second later, his knees buckled and he began sliding slowly down the side of the Dumpster until he crumpled lifelessly to the ground.

  “What’s going on?” asked Bill McCreary over the radio.

  Califano tapped his transmitter. “Company,” he said, still trying to catch his breath. He paused for a moment, making sure the coast was clear. Then he picked up the crowbar and quickly made his way behind the Dumpster.

  Time to find out what’s beneath this hatch.