Checkmate

by Steven James

  That man.

  Who’d said he knew her brother.

  Now, as she thought of that, her heart churned with apprehension.

  Calm down, Corrine.

  The van. She was there—she remembered that—handcuffed. For how long? He’d drugged her and she had no idea. Hours? Days? But no, it couldn’t have been days, could it? She was hungry, yes, but not starving.

  Calm down.

  You’re wearing clothes. Shoes. Jeans. A shirt. At least there’s that. At least—

  Calm.

  Down.

  She was an executive vice president for The Berringer Group, an internationally known accounting firm. She was not the kind of woman to panic. No, no, no, she was not. She could handle this and she was going to figure it out.

  You’re fine, you’re fine, you’ll be fine.

  However, despite her attempts to reassure herself and to feel in control of the situation, she didn’t feel like she was in control of anything.

  Her breathing was becoming ragged.

  So, where was she?

  She felt the ground.

  Rock, with a small layer of loose dirt on top of it.

  “Hello!” She screamed it this time and she couldn’t tell, not for certain, but it didn’t sound to her like she was in a cellar. The echo was too narrow and drawn-out, went on too long.

  A cave or a tunnel of some kind.

  Blinking meant nothing. The world of darkness inside her and outside her—it was all the same. With no light and without some reference point, it was as if she were lost inside of herself with no way to look out.

  Pressing against the wall and feeling with one hand above her to make sure her head didn’t hit anything, she slowly stood, then reached up hesitantly and found a rock ceiling not far above her head.

  She turned and, patting her hands in front of her, discovered that the wall was relatively uniform, not like a cave, but with no sign that concrete blocks had been used either.

  Some sort of tunnel.

  Musty.

  Cool.

  Water dripping nearby.

  Somewhere in the dark.

  She felt her way along the wall for a couple feet, but then realized that without some sort of reference point, she might easily get lost. She needed a way to identify where she’d started so she could map out in her mind where she was.

  Drip.

  She knelt, scavenged for a rock that she could use to mark her spot, and eventually found one about the size of a softball. After memorizing its shape, she placed it against the wall to mark where she’d been when she awakened.

  Drop.

  Keep your hand on the wall and count your steps. Check one direction, then the other.

  Touching the wall, she cautiously moved forward, tapping her foot to make sure there was no drop-off.

  Drip.

  Water on water.

  Somewhere nearby.

  Punctuating every passing moment.

  Slowly, carefully, and counting every step, Corrine began to try to orient herself to the tunnel that the man who knew her brother, the man who’d pressed that blade to her neck and had held her through the night, had left her in.

  20

  Wednesday, July 31

  My mentor once told me that every dead end shows you more clearly the pattern of the labyrinth, that each one you encounter gives you one more piece of information that’ll help you as you methodically fail your way to success.

  That’s how he put it: failing your way to success.

  And very often that’s exactly what an investigation feels like. You reach dead end after dead end, but as you eliminate possibilities you begin to narrow down the possible outcomes.

  Failure.

  That leads to success.

  At least you hope it leads there.

  First thing in the morning, Lien-hua and I went to work at the Academy. Beck Danner was watching our house. Budgetary concerns meant that from here on out only one agent could be there to keep an eye on things, but apparently he and his partner were going to alternate shifts.

  Before I left, I told him he was welcome to use the bathroom in our house if he needed to.

  This morning everyone was following up on tips. We had a conference call with Margaret and Jennings so he could keep the president appraised of the situation, although as time went on, it seemed more and more like this was an isolated case and not part of an ongoing terror campaign against the government.

  The morning passed in the examination of evidence, the analysis of the data, the reevaluation of the information we had.

  Investigations don’t move forward at an even pace but rather in jumps and starts. Setbacks and revelations come in waves. Doors open, even as others swing shut. And as you move forward everything is in flux.

  Keeping all of the working parts moving in the right direction and making sure everyone has the most up-to-date information are always some of the biggest challenges.

  These days it’s much easier to do with live updates and text notifications from the online case files, but still, all throughout the morning I felt like I was playing catch-up.

  After two hours, we turned our attention to the video footage of the people who’d been present at the museum the day the artifacts disappeared, comparing their gait, posture, and build with that of the unidentified man who had unloaded the lawnmower at the NCAVC building.

  There were no cameras directed at the Colonial weaponry exhibit, so we focused on the footage of people entering and leaving the building during its operating hours, but none appeared to be carrying any eighteenth-century arrows into the parking lot.

  I was interested in the events immediately leading up to the explosion at the NCAVC. Agent Guirret and two others were working their way through the list of employees, speaking with everyone, seeing what we might be able to turn up.

  Failing our way forward, we evaluated the evidence we had and tried to thread together the movements of the offender before the attack occurred.

  + + +

  Here’s what Corrine had found out: She was in a tunnel that varied somewhere between six and eight feet wide and rose about six feet high. Rocks up to the size of melons were strewn along the ground, but from what she’d been able to discern, the path was mostly flat.

  One tunnel.

  No connecting passageways.

  In some places, thick wooden beams supported the ceiling or propped up the walls. In others, all she could feel was the cool rock or sections of grainy dirt that crumbled beneath her touch.

  She’d ventured a hundred steps in one direction and fourteen in the other—only fourteen because that’s when she found the water.

  It spanned the width of the tunnel and there was no way to tell how far back it went, but when she tossed a few small rocks in front of her to gauge the distance, the stones ended up hitting a wall that, based on the sound, couldn’t have been very far away, before dropping into the water.

  Though the cool air of the tunnel chilled her, she wanted to know how deep the water was, so at one point she’d removed her shirt and dipped her arm in until the water was up to her shoulder. She didn’t feel the bottom.

  Since this seemed to be the end of the tunnel, she wondered if maybe there was a shaft that dropped before her and had somehow filled with water.

  But how did he get you in here? Did he lower you down somewhere and then carry you here? Is it possible he did something to fill that shaft with water? Maybe to keep you from crawling down to another tunnel?

  She wished she could remember more, but she’d been too out of it, and the memories of the trip into the tunnel had still not come back to her.

  She tried to get some sleep, dozed a little, but she had no way of knowing how long she’d slept.

  While she was awake, her eyes did not get
used to the dark—there is no getting used to complete and total blackness.

  Without light, without routine, without anything to accompany her apart from the slow, steady drip of water, she had no sense of the passing of time.

  In time, the dripping sound became a companion to her. She began to comfort herself with it as the monotony wore on her. She became dependent on it, like an addict. If it were ever to stop, she would feel like a friend had deserted her.

  It was almost like her life was split in two—the days before she woke up here in this tunnel, and the eternity of darkness that had begun when she opened her eyes and found herself in this place of no light.

  How much time had passed now?

  It was impossible to say.

  She took to counting the drips of water and taking her pulse and using that as a way of reconnecting herself to the world somewhere far above her, where the continuity of time and the passage of moments meant something.

  She wondered what she would be doing if she were up there.

  Would she be in bed? At work? At the gym doing her spinning class?

  Certainly, by now, she would have been missed. After all, she never showed up for her flight, she hadn’t made it to Miami, and her boss and colleagues would no doubt be wondering what had happened to her. There would have been texts to her, yes. E-mail, phone calls, sure. But would anyone suspect foul play? Would they call the cops? She wasn’t sure. Maybe.

  Hopefully.

  And her disappearance would undoubtedly make the news—considering who she was the sister of.

  But what good would that do? How are they ever going to find you?

  Corrine had never been scuba diving, but she had been snorkeling in Hawaii on a business trip two years ago. She knew that the farther down you swam, the more pressure you felt on your ears. But as far as she knew, it wasn’t the same with venturing underground.

  So she might just be a few feet beneath the earth’s surface or, if the man who’d abducted her had found a way to lower her, she could be hundreds of feet underground.

  But either way, you have to find a way out. You missed your flight. People will be looking for you.

  But how would they ever think to look here, wherever here was?

  Corrine realized the water nearby could serve as a reference point for her. She could go as far as she wanted in the other direction, and then come back this way until she reached the water’s edge. When she did, she would know that she was fourteen steps from where she’d woken up.

  As far as getting by, as far as surviving, she needed air, food, and water.

  And warmth.

  She needed that too.

  The tunnel was large enough that it didn’t seem like running out of air was going to be a problem. But she would need food and she definitely needed water.

  Yes, she could drink the water at the tunnel’s end—but since she had no idea how contaminated it was, the thought disturbed her.

  The dripping water was out of reach, but when she’d explored earlier she’d found a trickle of water coming from the ceiling about fifty steps away, so she could use that if she needed to.

  She had no food.

  And no way, apart from moving, to stay warm.

  A number of years ago a friend of hers had hiked through the Wind River Range of Wyoming and had told her about hypothermia, about how you shiver at first and then lose circulation in your fingers and toes, the nonessential parts of your body, so that you can conserve heat in the parts that matter most—the heart, the lungs, the brain.

  Yes, at first you shiver.

  And then you stop shivering and that’s a bad sign. It’s your body telling you it’s giving up.

  There’s mental disorientation. Lack of clear thinking. Poor decision making. Maybe even hallucinations.

  She needed to keep moving, to keep her core temperature up, because once you started on the spiral into a lower core temperature, you would be on your way toward serious trouble.

  Okay.

  So, try the other direction, away from the water. It would give her the information she needed about the length of the tunnel and it would help keep her warm.

  Stay dry. Keep moving. And find a way out.

  With one hand on the wall, she tapped her foot before her and left to see how far this tunnel actually extended.

  + + +

  Tessa checked her messages and saw that her friend Melody had asked her where she was. She thumb-typed: At the house. My dad has this guy watching me.

  A guy watching you?

  An FBI agent.

  Oh. Old?

  Twenty-four.

  How do you know?

  Asked him.

  Ha! Is he cute?

  He’s . . . Yeah.

  You go, girl.

  It’s not like that.

  Uh-huh. :)

  All morning as Tessa had packed, she’d tried not to think about Beck Danner, but her thoughts kept finding their way back to him—which sort of annoyed her, since there was no way in the world she would ever be able to hook up with him.

  But still.

  He had this kind of raffish thing going on.

  And he was sitting out there in the car the whole time.

  Okay, it was true—she had a thing for older guys. Not way older or anything, not like Patrick’s age, but guys in their early twenties.

  Twenty-four?

  Sure, you know? She would be nineteen in a couple months, so twenty-four wasn’t really that much older.

  Her interest in older guys hadn’t gone over so well with Patrick. As a former cop and now an FBI agent, he was insanely overprotective. She realized that because of what he’d seen in his job, he couldn’t really help it, but still, it was irksome. He’d actually ordered background checks on some of the guys who’d asked her out.

  Admittedly, a few times things had gone awry when she was alone with older guys, but that was all in the past.

  Beck.

  It was kind of a cool name.

  Stop it. He’s probably married or at least seriously into someone. Just forget him. Just pack.

  She paged through her 1935 copy of Vidocq: The Personal Memoirs of the First Great Detective. She had Edwin Gile Rich’s translation, since she wasn’t proficient enough yet in French to read the book in its original language.

  What other literature was inspired or impacted by the book? Only Hugo’s Les Misérables, Balzac’s Vautrin, Dickens’s Great Expectations, and, of course, the detective stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe. And yet most people had never even heard of the French detective and master of disguise.

  It bugged her that she hadn’t been able to pick up French as fast as she had Latin.

  She’d traveled to Mumbai once with Patrick when he was teaching at an international conference on emerging technology and investigative procedures. While he taught, she explored the city. It was humbling. Most Indians knew at least three languages—Hindi, English, and a regional language like Tamil or Telugu. Many knew five languages.

  Even though she was learning French and could—most of the time—read it, she really only knew Latin and English. Two languages. Better than most Americans, but still pretty lame.

  Yeah, take Vidocq to college, finish reading it there.

  She turned to the books of the Christian mystics that her mother had given her—Dark Night of the Soul by Saint John of the Cross, the anonymous volumes The Cloud of Unknowing, and The Way of a Pilgrim. There was a collection of the works of François de Fénelon—maybe the most insightful of the mystics. And of course, Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God.

  Finally, she picked up the volume containing the works of the woman her mother had named her after, Saint Teresa of Avila. She paged through the book, translated by Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, and found on
e of the prayers of her namesake. Last winter she’d scribbled a date next to it indicating when she first read the prayer:

  If suffering for love’s sake

  Can give such wondrous delight?

  What joy will gazing on you be!

  What would it be like to love God like that? To have that kind of faith? A faith that looks on it as an honor to suffer for the sake of love, a faith that’s astonished and overwhelmed with anticipation at the prospect of seeing her beloved’s face?

  Tessa really had no idea.

  For Saint Teresa, suffering for the sake of her Savior meant delight, and seeing his face meant everlasting joy. In her poem “Ayes del Destierro,” or “Sighs in Exile,” she wrote those shocking lines that only a saint could pray:

  Ansiosa de verte,

  Deseo morir.

  Longing to see you,

  Death I desire.

  How could anyone love God more than life itself?

  Your mom did, remember?

  True.

  But—

  The doorbell rang.

  It’s him! It’s Beck!

  Okay. Hold that thought.

  Tessa went to the front door’s peephole.

  Yeah. It was him.

  She swung the door open.

  “Hello, Tessa.”

  Nonchalant, be nonchalant. “Hey.”

  “Listen, I was wondering if I could use the bathroom—your father told me it would be okay.”

  “Um. Sure.” She stepped aside and motioned for him to come in. “It’s down the hall.” Then she added, “Just past my bedroom.”

  “Thanks.”

  As he passed her, she caught the scent of cologne. Outdoorsy. Bold. He hadn’t had it on yesterday.

  He walked down the hall, past her bedroom door that was slightly open, and found the bathroom.

  As she waited for him to return she felt her heart pounding anxiously in her chest.

  A few minutes later she heard the toilet flush and then water running in the sink.

  That was it.

  That quick.

  But it seemed like forever.

  Beck emerged. “Thanks. It’s a long time to sit in the car.”

  “No kidding. If you want to sit in the living room here, I mean, that’s okay with me. If that’d be easier—that’s all I’m saying.”