The Ninth District - A Thriller

by Douglas Dorow

  Lightning flashed across the sky, followed almost immediately by claps of thunder. Jack jumped and looked back into the cave. The rain refreshed its intensity, pouring out of the sky, splashing on the saturated grass. Alex took a half step back into the cave to get out of the rain, but kept facing outside.

  “Jack, come on!” Ross yelled from inside the entrance. His voice was muffled, echoing off of the concrete walls, and was almost drowned out by the rain splashing on the ground. “Get in here before you get hit by lightning.”

  “Alex, how much longer?” Jack asked, ignoring Ross.

  “They’ll be out soon.”

  Chapter 50

  Jack walked down the slope towards the river. If he was going to get wet, he wanted to move around. He couldn’t just stand and wait. When he reached River Road, he turned around and looked back up the hill at the Federal Reserve. What the hell was going on? The Governor had been robbing banks and killing people. There was an explosion in the tunnels under the Federal Reserve and he was standing here in the rain hoping he wouldn’t be hit by lightning. He looked across the river, barely able to see the other side through the sheets of rain. Nobody could be watching him in this weather from over there. They had to be closer. He looked back up at Alex. Somebody on the inside?

  Alex stepped out of the tunnel and waved. “They’re coming. They’ll be here any minute.”

  Jack waved back and started up the hill.

  The team put the stretcher down inside the tunnel out of the rain. “Call it in, Alex,” the team lead commanded. “We’re all back. We found two dead and one survivor who needs attention.”

  “Can he talk?” Jack yelled in from the entrance. “Do we know what happened?”

  The lead looked at Jack and then at Ross. “You’re with the FBI?”

  Ross nodded.

  “These three had some sophisticated digging equipment. They knew what they were doing.”

  “They hit a gas main or something?” Ross asked.

  “No, somebody else detonated the explosion. It looks like they wanted to collapse the tunnel and kill or trap these guys underground.”

  “A diversion,” Jack said.

  “Maybe.” The team lead looked down at the man lying on the stretcher. “This guy’s going to make it. Hasn’t said a word once he found out the other guys were dead.”

  The man looked up at them from the stretcher, his unfocused eyes darting back and forth between them as they spoke. The whites of his eyes floated across his face black with dirt.

  “They knew how to dig, but I don’t know how smart they were. They were digging a long ways from the vault.”

  “We were so close,” the man said, struggling to sit up. “Thirty more minutes and we would’ve been at the door into the vault.”

  Jack took another step into the tunnel. “Did you say a door into the vault?” He glanced at the team lead who shook his head.

  “Sure. I’ll tell you who’s not smart.” The man patted the thigh pocket of his cargo pants. “Where’s my drawing?”

  The lead held out a folded piece of paper. “You mean this?”

  The man grabbed it from his hand. “Who’s the dummy?” He unfolded the paper and held it out so he and the others could see it. “Shine a light down here.” He moved the paper around until the beam from a flashlight illuminated the paper. “Who’d put a door in a vault you can get to from the outside?” Then he laid his head back down, exhausted.

  Jack took another half of a step into the tunnel. “Can I see that?”

  The team lead handed Jack the piece of paper. Alex handed him a flashlight. After looking it over, Jack looked at Ross and then the team lead. “Let’s go. Bring him along. I need to compare this to something else. He might not be so smart, but somebody is.”

  Jack led Ross and the team carrying the stretcher back into the Federal Reserve building, where their wet shoes and boots squeaked on the tile floor. They paraded into the cafeteria where Jack and Ross had left the drawings they had recovered from the Governor’s condo. “Put him down there next to the table,” Jack directed the two guards carrying the stretcher.

  “Junior, come here.” Jack leaned over the drawings on the table and spread flat the sheet that the man had shown them. “Look at this.” He pointed to the sheet and then the blue line drawings of the Federal Reserve that Ross had carried through the rain. “What do you see?”

  “His drawing is the same as ours. Links them to the Governor.”

  “Come on, Junior. What else?”

  Ross looked back and forth between the drawings and sat back. “There’s some kind of door or hatch in the corner, underground. It’s not in the originals.” He looked at Granowski who had joined them. “There’s no hatch in the vault, is there?”

  “No,” Granowski laughed and shook his head.

  Ross walked over to the prisoner still lying on the stretcher and squatted down next to him.

  “Did you hear that, buddy? There’s no hatch underground through the vault. Who’s the dummy?”

  The man just stared at Ross and then closed his eyes.

  “Come on, man. Talk to us. Somebody took you guys for fools and then tried to kill you. He had you go to all that work for what?”

  The man opened his eyes. “No hatch?”

  Ross looked into the man’s eyes and shook his head.

  “Can I sit up? Maybe have a Coke and a smoke?”

  They got the man situated at the table with a plastic bottle of Coke, an empty coffee cup for ashes, and a pack of cigarettes. He guzzled half of the bottle of soda, burped, tapped a cigarette out of the pack, put it to his lips, and asked for a light. After inhaling heavily and blowing a cloud of smoke towards the ceiling, he leaned forward on the table and spoke. “That bastard. There’s no hatch?” He looked at Ross.

  “One way in. And it’s from inside the building. Look here.” Ross took his turn pointing out the differences between the drawings. “Here’s your drawing, given to you by your boss? And these drawings are the original engineering drawings we got from his condo today. Yours were modified to show the hatch you thought you were digging to. And when you got close, he tried to kill you. All the Federal Reserve guards would have found were the dead bodies of some idiots trying to dig their way into the vault.”

  The man stared at the drawings and shook his head. “Am I the only one that survived?”

  “How many were down there? The team found you and two bodies.”

  The man closed his eyes. Tears slowly formed at the edges and dribbled down his cheeks. He was trembling. Ross started to reach out for the man. Jack grabbed his arm and shook his head. “Wait,” he mouthed.

  The man inhaled deeply and blew out a long breath through pursed lips. Then he opened his eyes. He looked at Ross. “They’re both dead?”

  Ross nodded.

  “Shit. One was my brother.” The man leaned forward and looked down at the table, his shoulders slumped. “What do you want to know?”

  Twenty minutes later, they knew his name, the names of the deceased, and most of the plan as far as he was aware. It had been an elaborate scheme that was surprisingly successful at penetrating the ground beneath the city, working its way towards the Federal Reserve vault. Up until the explosion.

  “Your boss was down there shortly before the explosion?” Ross asked. Jack and Granowski leaned forward to listen.

  “He came down to check our progress. Congratulated us and said we had until one o’clock to make it to the vault. Then he left.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know. He left.”

  “How did you get in and out of the tunnels?”

  “We had three different routes. Each was a hike. An hour or so.”

  Jack stood up. “He might still be down there.” He ripped a page out of the set of drawings, flipped it over, and sketched a crude overhead view of the area showing the Mississippi River, the bridge, and the Federal Reserve building. He held out his pen. “Show us where the ent
rances are that you used.”

  The man sketched them in outside of the boundaries Jack had drawn and described where each one was.

  “Can you get some of your team to check these out?” Jack asked Granowski.

  “We’ll get them covered, plus some of the others we know about.”

  “What others?”

  “These are more out of the way, but there are lots of ways down into the sewers. Some that are farther away. There are some that are closer. Especially the sewer manholes in the streets.”

  “Junior, get somebody from the Minneapolis sewer department that knows what’s down here and tell them we might need some equipment for going down there.”

  Ross started dialing the phone. “How about some maps?”

  “Good thinking, Junior. I knew I brought you along for something.” Jack flashed Ross a quick smile and then returned to his conversation with Granowski.

  Jack tried to focus the group while they waited for the sewer crew and tried to decide what to do next. “Come on, guys.” He looked at Granowski. “The Governor created this whole thing to distract you from something else. The Fed is still the target. He staged the attempt on the vault, created an explosion, expected everyone to be killed.” Jack looked over the drawings on the table. “If it’s not the vault, what is it?”

  Granowski had a worried look on his face. “Could he be hitting something somewhere else after bringing the focus here?

  “Good question, but I doubt it. We can work that angle while we continue looking here.” Jack looked at Ross. “Why don’t you have a couple of guys in the office work that one?” Ross started to leave. “Wait a second, Junior.”

  Jack looked back at Granowski. “If it’s not the vault, any plans to move money?”

  “No trucks are scheduled for another day.”

  “Anything other than money?”

  “Check clearing, funds transfer, it’s all money,” Granowski said. “It’s what we do.”

  “And you’ve never been robbed?”

  “Never.”

  “What happens if you are?”

  “The shit hits the fan.” Granowski looked worried. “It would have a world-wide impact. Confidence in our money system could plummet. Banks wouldn’t know what to do. We’d stop moving money for a while until things got sorted out. That would cause a shortage in areas.”

  “No trucks scheduled to move anything, but you’ll wire transfer?” Jack asked.

  “That’s how most of the money is moved today. Lots of security, passwords, tokens, special secured computer network.”

  “Is the network up now?”

  “It was down for the holiday.” Granowski looked at the clock on the wall. “Like I said, it will be back up and running at one o’clock.”

  “That’s what he’s after,” Jack said.

  “Impossible. I told you about all of the security. It’s the safest, most monitored network in the world.”

  “Can you delay restarting it?”

  “Yes, if we really need to, but they aren’t breaking in there.”

  “Maybe they don’t need to.” Jack stood up. “Junior, now go make the call. Have a couple of people at the office work the angle that something away from here is the target. Get Sure Thing, Squeaky, and anybody else he needs down here to help with the computer network stuff.”

  Chapter 51

  The round circle of light from the headlamp cut through the darkness and lit up the black plastic bag that was hanging from the large conduit that ran through the tunnel. The Governor removed the leather gloves and tucked them in his pocket before grabbing the dust-covered bag.

  They had been planning this for over a year and placed the controller here almost six months ago in preparation for this moment. The Governor wasn’t even sure that the equipment was still in place. He had kept himself from checking on it until a month ago. He couldn’t believe he was standing in front of it now ready to end the wait. He tore open the bag and carefully removed the controller. Made up of a small computer screen with a thicker, plastic shell behind it, everything appeared intact. He pulled a small, flexible computer keyboard from his pocket, unrolled it, plugged it into the port on the side, and said a small prayer. Then he flipped a switch and watched the screen come to life. He was ready to make himself rich.

  * * *

  They pulled another table over next to the one that had the Federal Reserve blue prints laid out on it. Two men wearing stained overalls and worn leather work boots stood among the group, looking out of place among the clean tile floors and cafeteria tables and chairs.

  “I’m Jack, Special Agent Miller.” Jack stuck out his hand and looked into the eyes of the man closer to him, the man with his hands in his pockets. “With the FBI,” he finished, grabbing the wide, strong hand of the man and shaking it. The hand felt rough and calloused. Jack glanced down and saw that splotches of dirt and rust colored the skin on the knuckles. The fingernails were uneven and dirty underneath and around the cuticles. The first two fingers had tobacco stains mixed in among the dirt and rust. “The other two here are Special Agent Fruen and Officer Granowski with the Federal Reserve.”

  The man finished the handshake and put his hand back in his pocket. He was in his fifties, with a shaved head and a short, grey goatee. He had a cigarette tucked behind his right ear. “I’m Mike. This here’s Jimmy.” He tipped his head back at his partner standing behind him. “No titles, just Mike and Jimmy.”

  Jimmy was mid-twenties, a little over six feet tall, and lean. He smiled and squinted his blue eyes quickly at Mike’s comment. He had a faded Minnesota Wild baseball hat on his head. It looked like it had fallen in the sewer more than once. He stood behind Mike and held rolls of yellowed paper in his arms.

  “What’s going on?” Mike asked.

  “Those are maps of the sewers?” Jack asked in response.

  Jimmy nodded.

  “Put them on this table and we’ll tell you what we need.”

  They stood around the table looking down at the maps of the sewers that Mike and Jimmy had brought. The corners of the paper were held down with salt and pepper shakers to keep the map from curling closed. “This one covers most of the area around here on this side of the river,” Mike said.

  “So we found them somewhere around here.” Jack pointed to a spot on the map where the three diggers had been working their way towards the vault when the explosion happened. “It wasn’t a sewer, but more of a tunnel. Those aren’t on the maps?”

  Mike placed his palms down on the maps and leaned in with his unlit cigarette held in his right hand between his pointer and middle fingers. “No, but we’ve got notes or know about most of the tunnels under the city here. The sewers and tunnels are all tied together one way or another.” He flipped his thumb at his partner. “Jimmy is the one that knows what it’s like down there. I used to go down, but now I’m senior so I stay up and operate the truck and equipment and Jimmy goes down for inspections.”

  “If a guy was down there and knew his way around, where could he come out?” Jack asked.

  “And he doesn’t want to be noticed,” Ross added.

  Mike leaned over the drawings. He put the cigarette between his lips and put on a pair of reading glasses. “I’ve got a couple of ideas.”

  Jimmy spun the baseball hat around backwards on his head. “Here, here,” he stabbed at the map. “Maybe here.”

  “Fuck, Jimmy.” Mike looked at Jimmy with a look of frustration. Then he looked at Jack. “Pardon my French. I don’t know what Jimmy’s thinking.” He stabbed the cigarette at the paper. “He started here. He could go three ways from there.”

  “He’d go one of two ways,” Jimmy interrupted.

  “Like I was saying, he could go three ways.”

  “But he wouldn’t head towards downtown, would he?”

  Mike inhaled deeply. “Jimmy, just shut up. We’ll work through this.”

  “You just need a smoke.”

  Mike looked at Jack. “He’s young.�
�

  Jack nodded towards Ross. “I know how it goes. Do you want a smoke while we talk through this?”

  Granowski interjected. “He can’t smoke in here.”

  “Just one,” Jack answered.

  “Everybody smokes now?”

  “Light ‘er up, Mike,” Jack said while he looked at Granowski. Then he leaned back over the map. “We need to hurry, guys. If the man we’re after is still down there, where should we look? Give me your three best guesses on his route and where he could get to in, what?” Jack looked at his watch. “Ninety minutes.”

  Mike inhaled deeply and blew the smoke towards the ceiling. “OK, I’m thinking here by the Stone Arch Bridge,” his stubby finger jabbed at the map, “or north of the train bridge here, there’s a sewer that empties into the river.”

  “That’s it?” Jack asked.

  “Where else do you think?” Mike asked, looking at Jimmy.

  “Those two are the easiest, most direct paths.” Jimmy put his dirty finger on the map at the point they’d found the tunnelers. “If they said he went this way, he came to here.” He traced the path on the map. “From here he could go three ways to start with and then depending on which way he went it branches out multiple ways from there. Your guess would be as good as mine.”

  “So it sounds like we need to start there,” Jack said.

  “Maybe if we get down there we can tell which way he went,” Ross said.

  “Junior, you’re in no shape to go down there with one arm in a sling.”

  “Who’s going? You?” Ross asked.

  “There’s nobody else,” Jack said.

  Chapter 52

  “Here, put these on.” Jimmy stood at the back of the panel truck and set a pair of faded, blue coveralls on the bumper along with a pair of knee-high, green rubber boots and a yellow hard hat with a light attached to the front. Everything was filthy.