Edwin C. had gotten his wish; the tunnel bearing his name is ambitious, and long. It shoots just shy of two miles through the hard granite wall that divides the North American continent down its geographic center. Anyone who drives the route regularly knows that two lanes in each direction no longer provide sufficient capacity. And when one of the two lanes in either direction is closed for some reason, the resulting backups can leave vehicles bumper-to-bumper for miles.
Lizzie woke up to the blare of a big rig’s air horn. The truck was on the other side of the highway, coming downhill. It seemed to me that the trucker was signaling to another long-haul driver who was heading off the road to a paved area where he could check his brakes prior to the steep descent that awaited him on the road toward Dillon.
“Are we there?” Lizzie asked, dazed from her doze.
“Wishful thinking. We’re still in traffic. There’s only one lane open through the tunnel. Things should free up as soon as we’re on the other side.”
“How long will it take after that?”
“I’ve been known to do it in well under an hour,” I said. When she didn’t respond I asked, “I’ve been wondering something. If they poisoned me, what should I be watching for? How would I know?”
“I don’t want to suggest anything to you. I’m watching you for symptoms. Leave that to me.”
“And?”
“So far I don’t see anything but paranoia.” She laughed.
I didn’t.
A minute later I pulled, finally, into the tunnel portal. Orange cones blocked off the left lane. A series of tall rolling scaffolds had been erected so that workers—I guessed electricians—could do something with the overhead lighting. Coils of Romex snaked out of exposed circuit boxes above our heads. I thought the workers were replacing the fixtures.
With the tunnel lighting intact above the right lane, along with additional lighting that had been mounted on the scaffolds to assist the workers, and with the headlights of the slow-moving vehicles inside the bore, the tunnel was almost as bright as an overcast day.
“How long is this thing?” Lizzie asked.
“The tunnel? A little less than two miles.”
She shuddered. “So we’re in the middle of a mountain? I don’t like tunnels. I especially don’t like not being able to see the other end. I feel trapped when I’m in them. In the city, I can’t use the tunnels under the river anymore; I always take the bridges. Always.”
“What about the subway?”
“Until what happened in the Tube in London, it didn’t bother me.”
“That makes no sense,” I said. Except, I thought, for the part about London.
“I didn’t say it did.”
“A few minutes, we’ll be out,” I said, touching her on the wrist.
“You promise?”
“Yeah.”
But a minute later I wasn’t so sure. We hadn’t made it far and the line of cars in front of me had come to a complete stop.
Lizzie tolerated the lack of progress for about thirty seconds before she asked, “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. Construction, I guess.”
“Why aren’t we moving? We were moving before.”
“Maybe they’re shifting the position of one of those scaffolds and they’re temporarily blocking both lanes.”
I noticed that she’d moved her left hand onto my thigh. I felt pressure through her fingertips. She was anxious.
I considered the likelihood that I was with a claustrophobe in a stalled elevator.
My own fear was, as she had suggested, much more paranoid than phobic.
Lizzie’s difficulties aside, my mind started playing with the variables. She and I were trapped a little over halfway into an almost two-mile-long tunnel. The left lane was closed for maintenance on the overhead lighting. On the outside of each lane was a raised pedestrian pathway intended for use during emergencies. Traffic was stopped dead in the open lane in front of us and behind us. A parallel tunnel, over a hundred feet to the north through solid granite, carried traffic back in the direction we had just come. The only links between the two bores were occasional pedestrian passageways—built for use by maintenance personnel—that ran perpendicular to the roadways. The entrances to the cross tunnels seemed to be at least a quarter of a mile apart.
The question I was pondering was: Would this be a good place for the I-70 sniper to take someone out?
How would he, or she, avoid detection? How would he, or she, escape?
I quickly decided that avoiding detection was impossible. The lighting in the tunnel was brilliant, there were a thousand possible witnesses, and a surveillance camera system covered every square meter of the interior.
Getting away? Immediately, I recognized that those maintenance passageways between the two bores might allow a relatively uncomplicated escape. The sniper could wait just inside one of the connecting passages, shoot someone—like me or Lizzie—while we were stalled in the eastbound bore, then turn and run thirty or forty yards through the pedestrian connection to the adjacent westbound tunnel. There, a car would be waiting, the assassin would jump in and be out on the Western Slope side of the mountain in a minute or less.
But—but —the whole episode would be monitored by the tunnels’ surveillance cameras. The Colorado State Patrol would know within seconds exactly which vehicle to chase coming out of the tunnel on the Western Slope. Since there are no highway exits for miles on the western descent from the tunnel, the troopers would certainly be able to apprehend the sniper within a short time.
That’s as far as I’d gotten in my musing when the overhead tunnel lights flashed off.
No flicker, just—poof . Off.
My pulse jumped.
Seconds later—five, maybe—a smaller pattern of lights came back on. The tunnel was noticeably darker than it had been before the power failure.
Emergency generators, I thought. Backup lighting. Much lower wattage.
“What was that?” Lizzie said. “What just happened?” Her voice was tight with concern. I could tell that the pressure was tunnel phobia. She hadn’t made the logical leaps I was making. Yet.
Before I could answer her question the work lights on the scaffolds began to die. Not all at once. But haphazardly, one here, one there. The workers must have been following instructions to kill the lights in the event of a power failure so as not to tax the tunnels’ backup generators. Priority would undoubtedly channel most of the auxiliary energy to power the huge fans that were necessary to suck poisonous exhaust gases from the two tunnels. Overhead light was a luxury.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Power failure, maybe. It’s no big thing. The car headlights provide plenty of illumination for us to see our way out.”
She was examining my face and I could tell that she could see that I was trying to solve a puzzle. If this were a chess game, and not life and death, this would be like a mate-in-four exercise. This time, though, I knew it wasn’t a game, and I wasn’t on the attack; I had to see the future to avoid getting mated.
Because this time getting mated meant dying.
And dying meant not seeing Adam.
“What are you thinking?” she said. She was dead calm. I didn’t know what to make of the sudden change in her demeanor.
“I’m thinking that you may not be right about your colleagues’ reluctance to take us out together.”
She sat up straight and focused her attention out the windshield. “Tell me what you’re thinking. Exactly.”
“About fifty yards up on the left there’s a pedestrian passageway that leads over to the parallel tunnel, the one that carries westbound traffic. Workers use it, not the public. See it? That opening in the tile? It’s a dark shadow.”
She nodded. “Yes, I do.”
A horn honked someplace in front of us. Some other idiots echoed the noise.
Above our heads, the emergency lights flickered for a few seconds. Then they, too, died. The upper reaches of the bore went f
rom shadowy to dark. The only illumination left in the tunnel came from the vehicle headlights.
Lizzie’s temporary placidity evaporated. She was breathing heavily, through her mouth. “Go on,” she said.
“You know about the sniper who’s been working in Colorado?”
“Yes.”
“Is it one of yours?”
“I don’t know. I’ve wondered. It’s not out of the question. It wouldn’t be a primary plan. But it might be a backup. Kill a few people at random. Then kill you. Your death will look random, too.”
I growled, “Fuckers.” Then I refocused. “For the sake of argument, let’s say the sniper’s a Death Angel, and they’ve decided it’s time to kill us. If someone takes us out in here, that pedestrian tunnel could be their escape route. Two quick shots, then a short run down the passageway. It would be choreographed so a car would be waiting to pick them up on the other side. The only thing I can’t figure is how they would avoid the surveillance cameras.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Lizzie said, “Smoke.”
“Where?”
“No, no, I don’t see any. I’m saying they’ll use smoke to mask what they’re doing from the cameras.”
“How will they see us?”
“They’ll identify us before they create the smoke, and then if they need to, they’ll track us with infrared. The tunnel surveillance cameras need visible light; they won’t be able to see a thing.”
Her confidence in the tactical plan told me that the strategy she was imagining wasn’t a novel one for the Death Angels. Lizzie had seen smoke diversion used before. I was curious to learn more about the previous tactical details, but wasn’t sure I had the time to pick her brain.
In front of us, drivers began shutting off their engines. People climbed out of their cars. They began to huddle together; strangers started chatting with strangers. Lots of fingers were pointed down the tunnel. At what? I didn’t know.
“Should we get out of the car?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Definitely. If they already have us identified—and they know this car, so I’m sure they have—then they have an infrared scope on us by now. We have to move out of their line of sight so they can’t identify us so easily when the smoke starts. We have to put something between us and them to block the infrared signature. Otherwise we’re just …”
I silently finished her thought: Sitting ducks.
She got out of the car first. I thought of lowering the window on my door and pulling myself out of the opening like a stock car driver. Instead, I fumbled my way over the gearshift and climbed out in a more conventional manner on the passenger side. We were both still trying to act casually.
“Should we get behind the car in front of us?” I asked, my voice low.
Far down the tunnel somebody yelled, “Fire! That car’s on fire! Smoke, look!”
Someone else yelled, “Ruthie? Look! Let’s get out of here. Run! Run! Shit! Fire!”
I hopped forward and pulled myself up on the bumper of the Suburban that was stopped in front of the Porsche and used the perch to peer as far down the tunnel as possible. I couldn’t see any smoke at first.
Then I could.
White smoke was billowing out rapidly from the line of cars in big puffs, like thunderstorm clouds, or like steam bursting from a smokestack. My eyes moved left across the blocked-off lane and found the rectangular opening in the tile wall. The source of the smoke was just beyond the passageway. The cloud was moving in our direction.
“Smoke, Lizzie,” I said, without turning. “Almost exactly where the cross-tunnel passageway is. You were right.” When I turned to see why she hadn’t answered me, she was gone.
SIXTY-THREE
I dropped off the bumper and fell into a crouch in the space behind the Suburban. I wondered what I looked like in the sniper’s infrared scope.
Green, I decided. I looked green.
The panic in the tunnel in reaction to the smoke was predictable, and almost immediate.
People not already out of their cars jumped out and everyone began scrambling up the short ladders on the outside tunnel walls to get to the raised emergency pedestrian passageways, but since we were stuck somewhere close to the middle of the tunnel the throngs couldn’t decide which way to run. Some were pushing back in the direction from which we had come, away from the smoke. Others had apparently decided to try to sprint through the smoke to get to the eastern portal.
Tempers were flaring. People hurrying became people shoving. Yells became screams. Fear became panic.
Within thirty seconds the visibility in front of me was less than two car lengths. The smoke continued to thicken.
I dropped to all fours and hugged the roadway to try to stay below the worst of the smoke, and I searched for Lizzie. As I crawled back toward the Porsche I heard the retort of a rifle, and the metallic phhhfft of a slug piercing metal.
Before the volume of the screaming grew even louder, a second shot impacted the fender of my car just above the front tire on the driver’s side. That second shot had missed my head by no more than a foot.
I dove back for the relative safety of the shadow of the SUV.
I hissed, “Lizzie!”
“I’m under here,” she said. I felt fingers on my ankle.
“They’ll come for us,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “They will. Soon. Any ideas?”
“Come on,” I said. I took her hand.
We crawled, we crouched, we hopped, and we sprinted, trying desperately to stay in the shadow of the single line of vehicles as we made our way up the far right side of the roadway in the direction the cars were heading. In the direction of the smoke. In the direction of the sniper.
Despite the fact that traffic was at a dead stop, most of the people who were emptying out of the cars continued to fight for space on the emergency pedestrian walkways. Lizzie and I stayed on the tunnel roadway, using each sequential vehicle to shield our body heat from the infrared sensors in the Death Angel’s rifle scope.
She stopped in front of me seconds after it became clear we weren’t fooling whoever was shooting at us. Another slug whizzed between us as we skipped between two cars. The bullet chipped off a two-square-inch piece of subway tile from the wall behind us.
Lizzie sat on the roadway, her back against an old Dodge pickup. I did the same. The sniper knew where we were, and was obviously in a terrific position to intercept us before we made it to the pedestrian passageway.
“He can’t be on the walkway on either side. There’re too many people around,” she said. “He has to be up on—”
“One of the scaffolds,” I said. “You’re right.”
By then Lizzie and I were only about two car lengths away from the pedestrian tunnel that ran between the two bores. The smoke had become a thick, still fog. The light in the tubular beams from the parked cars’ headlights bounced right back at them. I knew that the stillness of the smoke cloud meant that the tunnels’ ventilation fans had failed. If enough drivers had left their engines running, carbon monoxide poisoning would be a factor.
We had to act.
“I have an idea,” I said. I told her what I was thinking.
“Why not?” she said. She turned around, reached up, and opened the door of the old Dodge.
I crawled in first, staying low in the foot well as I wormed my way to the floor on the driver’s side. Right behind me she did the same, but she stayed on the passenger-side floor. As I’d suspected, the keys to the truck were in the ignition. I forced the gearshift into neutral before I used one hand to turn the key, and the other to put slight pressure on the gas pedal. After a couple of plaintive turns of the starter motor, the engine kicked to life.
“Ready?” I asked. “On three. One, two—”
The last number got lost in the flurry of activity that followed. I pulled myself up onto the driver’s seat, pounded the clutch and popped the gearshift into first. Lizzie jumped up onto the passenger seat. The weight
of the clutch threw me for a moment and I almost stalled the truck as I turned the wheel hard left and begged the thing to begin to accelerate. But the truck was all torque, little acceleration. Once the transmission finally accepted what I wanted it to do it became apparent that the truck had plenty of low-end power. After a short initial roll, we jumped out of our lane and began to devour the series of flimsy orange cones that were cordoning off the work space in the left lane.
Lizzie reached over and kept pressure on the horn with her left hand so that any stray pedestrians would have a fighting chance to get clear of our path. I could see occasional glimpses of the tile wall off to my left, just enough to keep the truck going relatively straight as I built up speed and shifted into second gear. The smoke made it impossible for me to know how far it was going to be until the truck collided with the first scaffold.
It wasn’t long. The interval between my first sighting of the scaffold and our impact with the metal frame wasn’t more than half a second, barely enough time to brace myself, not enough time to get a “hold on” warning out of my mouth for Lizzie. The metal-framed structure was more substantial than I’d suspected, and at first I thought it was actually strong enough to slow the truck’s momentum. But I floored the gas pedal at the initial contact and within another half-heartbeat, it was clear that the pickup was shoving the reluctant structure down the left lane of the Edwin C. Johnson Bore at significant speed.
Three seconds later, maybe five, we cleared the worst of the smoke. Lizzie was leaning forward on her seat, looking straight up at the top of the scaffold. She screamed, “He’s still there! I can see him!” The truck slowed, but the scaffold kept moving. I could see it begin to rock forward, but it didn’t appear that it was going to tip enough to fall over. Gear teeth grated as I pounded the transmission back into first and floored the accelerator. The second impact with the truck rocked the unstable scaffold hard.
Kill Me Page 32
