“That’s mighty good of you, Chief,” Jim had said. “But that’s getting directly involved. I mean you on the radio.”
“What radio?” the chief had replied blandly.
Jim deliberately had not told the chief about the storm drain entrance on the seawall. Booth was possibly using some as-yet-unknown entrance to the old Fort Severn magazine rooms, but there was an equal chance he’d use that big storm drain tunnel. The grating he’d seen was at least five feet in diameter. Even someone Booth’s size could move quickly up that big pipe and into the main utility tunnels, and it wasn’t as if there would be sewage or anything truly unpleasant in the storm drain.
As they waited in the truck to see if Booth would return to his room, Jim asked Branner why she was risking her job.
“Because you need some adult supervision?” she asked.
He sighed and she laughed. “Okay,” she said. “Try this. I’m the supervisor of the Naval Academy NCIS office. It’s my supervisory judgment that there’s new and important evidence regarding what happened to Special Agent Thompson. Nothing to do with Midshipman Dell, of course.”
“Ah.”
“So I’m not disobeying orders here so much as exercising initiative. About Bagger. Not Dell.”
“It sounds good,” he said doubtfully.
“Look,” she said. “We catch Booth in the tunnels tonight, we’ll have enough to open the whole thing back up, SecNav or no SecNav. Especially if I can have five minutes alone with him.”
“Just by catching him down there?”
“We have the unexplained Dell death, linked by Markham to Booth. We have the missing college girl, who went into the tunnels, most probably with Booth. We have Bagger’s fatal assault case, plus some other assault cases over in town, linked to some guy in vampire drag-whom you saw in the tunnels. We have various destruction derbies down there since you’ve been looking for this guy, linked to a tag with a shark logo. Booth calls himself ‘the Shark’ on the Navy swim team.”
“Okay, so lots of circumstantial. But if Booth remains silent, we’ve got jack, right?”
She gave him a wolfish smile. “Like I said, Mr. Naval Academy Security Officer, I’m along to provide some adult supervision. By now, Booth has probably figured out that you know more than you should. And you’ve directly challenged him to meet you in the tunnels. If he’s been watching Markham, and I think he watches pretty good, he’s probably aware that she bolted out to her lawyer’s office earlier today. He’ll be more than prepared to meet you down there. One-on-one denotes personal combat, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely. Especially to a Marine recon wanna-be.”
“Okay, then. It’s probably going to get interesting down there-that’s more his turf than ours. What he doesn’t know is that I’m going to be down there. You two get together, you need to talk a little trash, provoke him into some boasting. Something that I can hear. I’m the arresting officer here. That’ll do it.”
He just looked at her for a moment. “He won’t do that unless I’m in the corner,” he said.
She smiled at him. “‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright,’” she said.
“Bleated the goat,” he replied. “The one tied to the stake.”
“Got any better ideas? Like you said, it’s not like we have a bag full of evidence here. Tell you what: As soon as he admits doing Bagger, I’ll just cap his ass, and then it’ll be just us chickens testifying at an inquest about an accidental shooting. That would get the balance of justice about right.”
“C’mon.” He laughed. “You can’t just go shooting the guy.”
“Watch me. In my book, that’s better than having some Communist defense lawyer get him off.”
He shook his head. Wyatt Branner at the O.K. Corral. She probably would do it, too. He glanced up. The light was on in Booth’s room.
“Yo, Houston,” he said, switching on the engine. “I believe we have contact.”
They drove to the back of Mahan Hall and parked the truck in the Alumni Hall parking lot. The chief materialized out of the darkness as they approached the grate.
“Decided to hang around and give you these personally,” he said, handing over the radios. “Plus a message-from a Mr. Harry Chang?”
Branner stepped forward. “That will be for me,” she said.
“Yeah, sounded like it. Mr. Chang was in a bad mood. Says he thinks you and my boss here are up to some wild-haired shit, to use his words. Says he has it on best authority that Mr. Hall has been told to cease and desist in regards to the Dell case, and that you have been similarly so instructed. Asked me to pass that along, should I happen to see you out and about the Yard.”
“And you said?”
“I said that I didn’t know anything about any police operations, and if I didn’t know anything, there weren’t any. That I had no idea where either of you was, but if you were together, it was probably not business.”
Jim smiled in the darkness, especially when he saw Branner’s expression.
“Anyways, he also said there were some people coming down tomorrow morning from headquarters to…lessee, this guy used a lot of code. Oh, yeah, he said there were some people coming down to ‘collate the available evidence, compile the final official report, and to review some recent management concepts with Special Agent Branner.’”
“Tomorrow morning?” Branner asked. “Definitely not tonight?”
“That’s what the man said,” the chief replied. “The retransmitter is in place in the main tunnel. I got guys physically securing all the grates from the outside. You want me to seal the one over on the Johnnie campus?”
“Can you?”
“Leave it to me. You’re trying to catch this vampire runner, right?”
“Right. We think we know who he is.”
“Why tonight?”
“Mr. Hall left him a little invitation,” Branner said. “Plus, another mid has given us reason to believe this guy had something to do with the Dell kid’s flying lesson.”
“Man, oh, man. This is definitely not my father’s Naval Academy.”
“Chief, I need one more favor,” Jim said. “Will this radio reach all the way over to the public works center?”
“Sure,” the chief said. “That’s a ten-watt transmitter.”
“I need you to go there, tell the utility watch officer that we’re in the tunnels, and listen for a code word: lights-out. This guy has had a couple years to put his own surveillance network up, and I think he gets electrical power for it by tapping into local lighting circuits. If I speak that code word, I need all the juice in the tunnels turned off. When I say, ‘lights on,’ turn it all back on, okay?”
“I can handle that,” the chief said. “You going along, Special Agent?”
“Wouldn’t miss it, Chief,” she said, patting the bulge where the Glock lived.
“Watch out using that thing down in the tunnels, Special Agent. That’s one big ricochet chamber.”
“Only if I miss his criminal ass, Chief,” she said with a sniff.
The chief gave her a two-finger salute and they went down the steps and through the steel door. They heard the chief lock it behind them, then brace the door with a metal bar. It was five minutes to midnight.
Ev and Liz picked Julie up in front of Dahlgren Hall. She carried a small overnight bag. She got in the backseat without a word. Tommy Hays had walked her out to the car. He waved and she waved back as Ev made a left turn and drove up the circular drive in front of the chapel.
“Any problem signing out?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
Ev looked sideways at Liz, who arched her eyebrows as if to say, Told you so. He went out the Maryland Avenue gate and drove up to State Circle, where he let them out by the gate to Liz’s house. He tried to think of something to say to Julie, but he couldn’t come up with anything, so he told Liz he’d be at home for the rest of the evening. She nodded and took Julie through the iron gates.
As if I had anywhere else to
go, he thought as he circled around the old Weems estate and headed back down in front of the St. John’s College campus. There were a few students out and about among the giant old trees on the front lawns. He stopped to let two oddly dressed girls cross the street. They looked like they were going to a Halloween costume party. Okay, he thought, so Julie’s pissed off at me. And at herself, because now the onus is on her to solve the honor problem. Ev wondered if the NCIS team had picked up Dyle Booth yet.
He tried to visualize Julie dating a guy like Dyle Booth but couldn’t quite do it. They had nothing in common except the swimming. Julie came from a very traditional family background; Booth from the white fringes of a Baltimore ghetto. Liz might have been right: The acerbic way Dyle could verbalize things didn’t square with a verbal skills problem. Had the kid been manipulating him in order to get at Julie?
Ev parked the car and got out. The night was very still now, with enough humidity in the air to give nearby lights a soft penumbra. Not quite fog yet, but soon, he thought. He went up to the darkened house and let himself in. He turned on the porch lights behind him, then turned them off. No point in porch lights-no one was coming to see him tonight. He walked down the darkened hall to the kitchen, through whose windows he could see the dock lights, which came on automatically at dusk. The furniture was all gray in the dim light. He stood at the kitchen sink and considered what he’d done this evening: alienated his daughter, and very possibly Liz as well. Could he have phrased it differently? Been more diplomatic? Explained it to Liz first, and not said anything to Julie? Yes.
He stared unseeing though the windows, knowing that it was dumb to be just standing here in the dark. He wanted to call Liz, but that wasn’t on, not tonight. He found himself wondering what else he didn’t know about his daughter. He turned on a light, fixed himself a snifter of scotch, and then went down to the dock to sit by the water. The highly varnished bottom of his upturned scull glistened in the dock lights.
13
At just past midnight, the main tunnel looked and sounded familiar: sterile concrete walls and ceilings, smelling faintly of ozone and steam, with the hum of electronic equipment racks and the quiet rush of steam permeating its entire length. They walked slightly uphill toward the King George Street interchange with the city utility vaults. They passed the big shark graffito, which remained unchanged. They did not speak, in deference to the possibility that Booth had the tunnels wired for sound as well as visual and electronic surveillance. The big steel doors leading out to the city tunnel were locked. Jim unlocked them and tried to pull them open. Neither of them budged.
“Okay! Chief,” Jim murmured.
“Hope we don’t get a fire down here tonight,” Branner whispered, looking at those locked doors.
“We do, we call for help,” he said, holding up his radio. He keyed the transmitter three times. There was a moment of silence, and then both of their radios clicked three times back at them. He stepped into an alcove to mask his voice.
“All the doors blocked?” he asked the chief.
“Affirmative.”
They walked back toward the intersection where the Mahan Hall grate door was, checking equipment room doors and generally looking around for signs of anyone else being down there. Then they continued down the long stretch under Stribling Walk, Jim watching in front of them and Branner walking backward, keeping an eye out behind them. When they got to the dogleg turn, Jim stopped, put his fingers to his lips, and listened hard. He’d felt a change in the air pressure. Something had been opened. Then he remembered the storm drain. He pointed back up the tunnel and whispered that he was going to check the storm drain’s flap doors. Booth might have figured out a way to open them from the drain side. She indicated she’d wait for him, just out of sight in the dogleg turn.
Jim yanked out his own weapon and went back up the tunnel. He walked to one side of the steel plates running down the center of the tunnel to avoid making unnecessary noise. The vestibule above the storm drain did not have any sort of door or hatch leading from the main tunnel down to the drain itself. The whole point was to have an immediate draining point for any water that got loose in the tunnels. But all the main grating access doors should be closed and locked. So what had been opened?
He got to the vestibule and the spring-loaded, sloping flap doors. He got down on his hands and knees and pushed on the center of the crack between the two metal flaps. They moved, but not easily. Putting a foot on one flap, he pushed against the hinge hard enough to expand the crack enough to get his hand into it. He could feel air streaming past his head. He ran his hand up the full length of the right-hand flap edge, but there was nothing but smooth metal. He switched his foot and tried the left-hand side.
Bingo, he thought. He felt a crude U -shaped handle bolted to the other side. So someone coming up from the river would have access from the main drain pipe. He was withdrawing his hand when his wrist was seized in a viselike grip and he was pulled headlong right through the two flaps. He yelled, dropping both his Glock and his radio, as his body hurtled down through the doors into a sloping circular concrete pipe. It was pitch-black in the storm drain once the spring-loaded doors snapped shut behind him, and the bottom of the pipe was slippery with ancient moss and the trickle of water that was constantly draining out of the utility tunnel complex. Whoever had grabbed him had essentially flung him down the drain, and he skidded on his backside for an unknown distance until he gathered his wits enough to spread out his arms and legs and stop himself. He immediately flipped over onto his stomach and snatched out the Maglite. He shot it up the tunnel and saw nothing at all except his gun and his radio. It felt as if the storm drain was sloping down at about a ten-degree angle. Easy enough to maintain his position, but steep enough to have slid him almost sixty feet from the doors. Whoever had grabbed him probably had gone up through the doors once Jim had opened them. Branner. He had to warn Branner.
He scampered back up the drain, staying low enough not to hit his head, and recovered the radio first. He called Branner, but the thing didn’t seem to be working. He turned it over. The battery compartment had opened and the battery pack was missing. He swore and retrieved his Glock. He shone the light up and down the tunnel, looking for the cigarette pack-sized battery, and finally saw a flash of shiny metal. He recovered the battery, his hands fumbling because everything was wet. Son of a bitch had moved the doors to attract his attention, then simply pulled him into the tunnel. Strong son of a bitch, too. While Jim had been skidding down the drain, their quarry had gone through the flap doors and now was loose in the tunnel.
Hunched over beneath the flap doors, he fumbled to get the battery back into the radio, and then, realizing he was wasting time, swore again. Stuffing the radio and battery into a pocket, he pulled the flap door with the handle down into the drain. The yellow lights of the main tunnel flooded the drain. He stood up through the opening and yelled for Branner to look out, but she didn’t respond. Then he realized he’d screwed up again: Branner had probably heard the commotion when he went through the flap door, but now Jim had just given away her presence to Booth, who must have heard him yell. Screw it, he thought. He hoisted himself through the flap doors, fighting with the spring hinges, which were pinching into him like aluminum mandibles. He got up and trotted down toward the Bancroft Hall end of the Stribling tunnel. When he got to the dogleg, Branner wasn’t there. Now what? he wondered. He called her name, but she didn’t answer. Had Booth managed to take her down? He couldn’t have-she’d been waiting for him.
He pulled out the radio, dried off the battery contacts, and put the thing back together again. Where the hell was Branner? Then he had an idea. Maybe she was not answering in order to make Booth think Jim was faking it, trying to make Booth think he had backup. He put the radio up to his mouth but did not squeeze the transmit key. Then he gave a series of orders to a host of imaginary backup people. Then he did squeeze the key and said, “Lights-out.” Two seconds later, when the entire tunnel went dar
k, he flattened himself between two equipment cabinets.
At least the radio system is working, he thought. Branner should have heard him doing his deception routine and figured it out. Booth was in the tunnel. But where? And where was Branner holed up? She should be close by. He tried to think of the layout of the tunnel walls in the vicinity of the dogleg. Around the corner was the cross tunnel that led out toward the harbor area and the old Fort Severn doors. Branner could be anywhere. Hell with it. It was time to get it on with young Mr. Booth.
Keeping his Maglite handy but off, he patted the Glock and started feeling his way in the pitch-black tunnel, heading back toward the vestibule above the storm drain. He called out Booth’s name but got no answer. He called it again.
“Yo, Booth! Or is it Count Dracula-a-a? Where are you, Booth? The doors are all locked tonight, so it’s just us chickens down here, Booth. And chicken seems to be the word, hey, Booth?”
He listened to the darkness, but there was nothing stirring. Some of the equipment behind all the cabinet doors was still going, but the ventilation was off and the tunnel was starting to get warm. He kept inching his way along the wall on the Annapolis side, bumping quietly into steel cabinets, wireways, and pipe nests. He called out again.
“Hey, big guy. Come on down. Let’s have us a little chat.”
His fingers itched to turn on the Maglite. He had a vision of Booth in vampire drag, hanging upside down from the tunnel ceiling, waiting to pounce. His hand remembered that powerful grip that had pulled him down into the storm drain. His knees and elbows still stung. But he’d seen nothing. He stopped to listen. Then he felt a presence in the tunnel.
Was something there?
He pointed the Maglite in the direction his senses were indicating and waited.
Nothing moved.
He took another sideways step and stopped again. “C’mon, Booth. We know what you did. You can’t win this thing.”
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