The Holy Grail (Sam Reilly Book 13)

by Christopher Cartwright

  Scott Williams, the director of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, charged with maintaining the security and defense of the Pentagon, greeted her with a team of twelve heavily armed officers. “What have we got, ma’am?”

  She turned to greet the director, “A single male looks like he’s in his early thirties, armed with a service-issued Glock 19 handgun, has taken one of the maritime and underwater incident consultants, Sam Reilly, hostage inside my office.”

  “Any casualties?” Williams replied.

  “No.”

  “Good. At least we know we have them secured. Your office, as you are aware, is heavily fortified. We can’t get in, but at least we know they can’t get out.”

  “Right,” she replied. “So, what’s your plan?”

  “We’ve already got a team working to gain a visual of the room. Once we know what’s going on inside, we’ll set up for a breach.”

  Tom said, “You’re going to break through the door?”

  The director shook his head emphatically. “No way. That’s just what he’ll be expecting. Besides, a door like that might take us a week to break through. No, we’ll go through the wall directly from her aide’s room next door.”

  “All right,” the Secretary said. “Just be certain when you breach that no one takes out Sam Reilly. He’s one of my best consultants, and I have no desire to replace him.”

  “Understood, ma’am.”

  Chapter Four

  The Pentagon is the world's largest office building, with about 6,500,000 square feet, which houses roughly 23,000 military and civilian employees, and another 3,000 non-Defense support personnel. It has five sides, five floors above ground, two basement levels, and five ring corridors per floor with a total of 17.5 miles of corridors. It includes a five-acre central plaza, which is shaped like a pentagon and informally known as "ground zero," a nickname originating during the Cold War on the presumption that it would be targeted by the Soviet Union at the outbreak of nuclear war.

  Sam Reilly quickly opened the first three drawers of the Secretary of Defense’s large mahogany desk. He removed several items, searching for it, while dumping multiple pages to the side. He made a small grin as he imagined the Secretary’s response when she discovered he’d been rifling through her drawers.

  Maybe it was better he was being held at gunpoint.

  “What are you looking for?” Ben asked, still holding the Glock toward him. “You’d better not be grabbing a weapon.”

  “The Secretary has the entire armed forces of the US military, CIA, FBI, and Homeland Security at her disposal. She doesn’t keep a weapon in her desk!” Sam continued to search and then smiled. “Of course, given the present circumstances, I can see the flaw in that reasoning.”

  Ben kept the handgun pointing at him. “So what are you looking for?”

  “A Stanley knife.”

  “So, you are getting a weapon!”

  Sam shook his head emphatically. “No. I’m getting a small cutting tool.”

  “Don’t think I can’t shoot you before you get close to me,” Ben warned.

  Sam grinned. “I don’t doubt it. You have a gun, I have a knife. You’ve already mentioned you have quick reflexes. Let’s agree I’m not even going to bother. That way, we can both concentrate on getting out of here alive.”

  “Okay,” Ben replied, without lowering the Glock. “So, what are you going to do with it?”

  Sam opened the last drawer, finding the small cutting tool. He withdrew the blade and slid the razor-sharp blade all the way out. “You’ll see.”

  He took six carefully measured steps forward from the desk and stopped. Sam ran his eyes across the room, mentally taking in its measurement. He dropped the Stanley knife on the dark blue carpet and returned to the desk.

  Ben raised an eyebrow with incredulity. “What are you doing?”

  “Measuring twice and cutting once.”

  “Oh, right,” Ben replied, in a crisp tone that implied he understood nothing about what Sam was trying to do.

  Sam counted his steps out loud, stopping at six.

  Without any further assessments, he knelt down and began cutting the dark blue carpet. The result was a thin line that ran in the shape of a square.

  Sam dug his fingertips into the edge and pulled back. The trapdoor opened, revealing a vertical ladder that ran into a dark tunnel below.

  Ben Gellie grinned. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “How did you know about this place?”

  “It was a built-in secret tunnel, designed as an emergency escape route in the case of an internal disaster. Few people know of its existence.”

  Ben looked at him through raised eyebrows. “We’re going to go down through the raised floor and just, what? Crawl our way to freedom?”

  Sam grinned. “Yeah, something like that. The only trick is going to be putting the carpet back in place…”

  Chapter Five

  The tunnel at the bottom of the ladder was narrow, meaning that they could only travel single file, but not tight enough to constrict their movement. The walls were made of solid concrete. The tunnel was formed by the coincidental layering of two nearby reinforced concrete piers that had been driven deep underground as part of the building’s original engineering. During construction, President Franklin D. Roosevelt inspected the works and engineering drawings, noticing the natural divide being formed along each internal and external wedge of the Pentagon. The President requested the natural space to be maintained as a secret passageway out.

  Sam knew about that story because his grandfather, who was good friends with then President Gerald Ford in 1975, had used the same passageway to leave the Pentagon for a secret meeting. Sam only wished that he knew the details – much of his grandfather’s business involved the CIA, which required discretion and ultimately meant that a large portion of his grandfather’s life was a mystery, buried by national security.

  The two of them had come up inside an empty conference room. Dirty and covered in dust, Ben Gellie let out three sneezes as Sam lowered the metal plate back onto the floor.

  “Been here before?” he said.

  “No.”

  “How do you know about this place?” Ben persisted.

  Sam ignored the comment. “We’re still inside the building.”

  “That’s right,” Ben said. “And I still have my Glock aimed at you. So don’t even think about making any funny moves.”

  He did, too. That particular itch that said someone was aiming a gun at him had settled in between Sam’s shoulder blades and seemed as if it would never stop. Even under the flooring, in the blind dark, Gellie had seemed to know with supernatural accuracy where Sam was at every moment, no matter how quietly he moved.

  And the big man had made barely a sound, even when he had to crawl through the narrow opening under the office and corridor. Overhead, the guards’ boots had stamped and shifted on the tiles, while the two of them had crawled onward through the dark.

  “If you’re still determined to get out of here…”

  “I am.”

  “Then we need to make it out of the building.”

  “Don’t even think about screwing me over,” Ben said.

  “I have to admit that it crossed my mind a couple of times down there,” Sam said. He was going through the conference room, trying to find anything that might assist in their escape. But he seemed to have run out of luck. “All I’d have had to do was accidentally hit my head on something, and they would have found us.”

  “Ha ha,” Ben said dryly. “All right, joker, let’s get a move on. Do you know where we are?”

  “Yes. The outer ring of Wedge 1, Corridor 3. Once we step outside the door, we need to take a right toward the heliport entrance, which is around one of the big corners, down corridor 4, and out the big double doors to the left. Bunch of helicopters. Can’t miss it.”

  “And a pilot?”

  “Let me worry about that,”
Sam said.

  “Everything’s on high alert. We’re just going to walk out of here?”

  “The usual procedure is to lock down areas by wedges. They think they have us contained in the Secretary of Defense’s office. Otherwise, we’d be hearing alarms and announcements outside the door.”

  “And if they’re just setting a trap?”

  “Then we duck back into the room, block the door, and head back under the floor.”

  “You sound more confident than you should,” Ben said. He did have a point – he was still aiming the Glock in Sam’s direction.

  Sam opened the door. A security detail was in the process of shutting down the outer ring of wedge 1. He closed the door again. “Change of plans.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “They’ve extended their area of lockdown. We’re going to need to get across to the next wedge through the secret escape tunnel.”

  Ben snarled, “So take me there!”

  “All right, all right…”

  Sam opened up the hatchway and climbed down. Ben followed right behind him, closing the hatch on his way down.

  “Where’s this going to take us out?” Ben asked in a sibilant hiss.

  “The tunnels open in multiple places throughout the Pentagon,” Sam replied. “I’m hoping to exit somewhere near the southwestern carpark.”

  “You’re hoping?”

  Sam shrugged. “It’s not like I have a map.”

  “What’s the point of having a secret escape tunnel that doesn’t get you out of the building?” Ben asked, irritably.

  “It does. Somewhere near the Potomac.”

  Ben asked, “So why don’t you take me that way?”

  Sam ignored him, stopping at a point where two tunnels intersected, where two wedges of the five-sided building met. He checked the compass on his dive watch, confirmed his position, and headed west, toward the southwestern carpark exit.

  “Hey,” Ben said, grabbing him by his shoulder, to face him. “I asked you a question.”

  Sam met his eyes, defiantly. “Yeah?”

  “Why don’t you take me all the way out of the building through to the Potomac?”

  “Because I promised you I’d get you out of here, and you promised me that you wouldn’t kill me in the process.” Sam forcibly shrugged Ben’s hand off his shoulder and continued walking west. “For reasons I’m quickly forgetting, I promised to get you out of here alive, and that’s exactly what I intend to do.”

  Ben kept up at a fast walking pace. “Why not take me out to the Potomac?”

  Sam stopped. He turned to face Ben and said, “It’s nearly a three-mile tunnel to the external exit. Pretty soon, someone’s going to realize that we’re no longer inside the Secretary of Defense’s office. When that happens, someone from the Pentagon Protection Force Agency will turn over the cut carpet, and when they do they’ll know exactly where we’ve gone.”

  “And by that time, they’ll have someone waiting for us at the exit along the Potomac,” Ben replied.

  “Exactly.”

  Ben asked, “But won’t we already be trapped inside the Pentagon by going this way? I mean, surely that’s the first thing the Pentagon Force Protection Agency did the second I took you hostage!”

  Sam shook his head. “That’s not how it works. The Pentagon’s more like a small city than a building. They don’t want to shut the whole thing down, even during an emergency. Instead, what they do is close down individual wedges of the Pentagon, one at a time, concealing us inside. But we’re already outside the initial wedge. Even so, we’d better move quickly.”

  Nearly four minutes later, Sam stopped where a vertical ladder ran through an opening in the ceiling. He didn’t wait for permission. Instead, he started to climb the metal rungs, hand over hand.

  “Where does this take us out?” Ben asked.

  “No idea. Someone’s office, somewhere near the southwestern wedge, I guess.”

  “Great. And if it’s currently occupied?”

  “Then we come back down and try our luck with the next one.”

  “All right.”

  Sam stopped at the top of the ladder and listened.

  He didn’t hear anything.

  Sam said, “I’m going to open the hatch.”

  “Don’t try anything stupid,” Ben replied.

  “I know. You’ve still got the gun.”

  “Good.”

  Sam opened the hatchway, thankful that it wasn’t obstructed by carpet. His eyes quickly swept the new environment. It was dark, but not completely, there were small red and green lights throughout the room.

  “Come on up,” Sam said. “We’re in the communications hub.”

  By the time he’d finished speaking, Ben was already up the ladder next to him. Ben raked the empty room with the barrel of his handgun, as though he were expecting attackers any moment. His eyes fixed on the only door in the room.

  “Where does that lead?”

  “No idea,” Sam said, honestly. “I’ve seen the access doors to other engineering rooms, communication rooms like these, and cleaner’s compartments lined on the corridors next to the bathrooms.”

  Ben moved close to the locked door and listened.

  After a few seconds, he said, “All right, let’s go.”

  Sam unlocked the door and went first.

  Behind him, Ben hid the weapon in his trousers. “Don’t forget I still have it.”

  As he guessed, the door opened to a long corridor that led to the men’s lavatories. He walked unhurriedly, with practiced insouciance.

  The big double doors that led to the southwestern entrance were completely blocked. Not by a group of armed soldiers or guards, but by a gaggle of functionaries. Clerks.

  Potentially, people that Sam would recognize.

  “What do you plan to do about that?” Ben asked. “Some kind of distraction?”

  They had proceeded along the corridor and turned around the corner, only to have Sam grab his shoulder and spin him around, so their faces weren’t visible. At least the Glock was out of view.

  “Back around the corner,” Sam announced. “Change of plans.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There are a couple of people out there who might recognize me and try to stop us to talk.”

  “Tell them off. Act normal.”

  “You don’t understand. These are professional bureaucrats. They can tie you up for hours. We only have a few minutes.”

  “If you don’t get me out of here…” The threat was clear in Ben’s voice.

  “I will. But we’re going to have to reroute a little. Back to the other door we passed, and quick. It’s not going to take much longer before they figure out what’s happened.”

  They retreated through the casual stream of pedestrians to a door that they had passed earlier. This one led to a secluded VIP lot.

  A guard at the door stopped them on their way out. “ID?”

  “What, don’t you recognize me?” Sam asked as he handed his ID to the guard. “I’m in and out of here all the time.”

  “Still gotta ask,” the security officer replied, studying his face. He then turned to Ben and said, unapologetically, “You too, sir.”

  Ben handed him his driver’s license.

  The security officer’s eyebrows narrowed. “He’s not on the list.”

  “No,” Sam replied. “He’s with me.”

  The officer paused for a moment and then nodded. He’d seen Sam bring a number of people through these gates over the years – all experts in their own specialized and unique fields. “Have a good day, sir.”

  Sam smiled politely, “You, too.”

  Walking through the security doors, Sam took his keys out of his pocket and jingled them pensively. “We’re parked over there.”

  “Over where?” Ben asked, squinting under the bright mid-morning sun.

  Sam pointed toward a brutally suave black four-door with a hood ornament shaped like a winged woman – a Rolls Roy
ce Phantom. A light dusting of snow was sprinkled on top.

  Ben stopped in mid-stride. “You’ve got to be kidding me. What sort of asshole drives a Rolls Royce in real life?”

  Sam grinned. “That would be my father.”

  Chapter Six

  The Secretary of Defense took a seat in her subordinate’s office, which she had appropriated for the extent of the siege. Someone had delivered her a hot coffee, which she sipped slowly, feeling every much as bitter as the beans inside.

  She wasn’t sure what to be more annoyed about. The fact that she was unable to work from her office, or that Sam Reilly had been taken hostage and depending on how that scene played out, she might need to find a new person to fill his unique role.

  She reached for the report she was working on and stopped. It was in her office. That settled it – she needed to get back into that office. Her office, where she knew where all the files were, both the hard copies and the files on her computer desktop. Her office, where she only had to hit a button on the phone to be able to speak to the Oval Office.

  Scott Williams, the director of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, knocked on the door and entered without waiting for her permission.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt you, ma’am.”

  “That’s all right,” she replied. “You’re not the first one to do so today. What can I do for you?”

  “We now have a live audio-visual feed from the inside of your office.”

  She stood up and asked, “What have you got?”

  “That’s just it, ma’am, we don’t have anything.”

  Her voice was incredulous. “You can’t see them?”

  “Or hear them for that matter. It’s as though they’ve disappeared.”

  “You’ve searched the entire office?”

  “Yes. Our technician was able to manipulate the camera in a 360-degree rotation.”

  The Secretary swore. “Get in there now!”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Sam Reilly’s taken him down the escape tunnel!”

  Chapter Seven

  Sam unlocked the car with the press of his fingers.

  Ben gave an incredulous smile. “This is your car?”