Checkmate

by Steven James

  Most of the windows were covered with a film of dirt, but there was one that was cracked. A centimeter-wide triangle of glass was missing.

  I leaned close and peered inside.

  40

  Nine wide holes had been burrowed through the concrete floor of the expansive three-story-tall warehouse. A backhoe sat in the corner of the building.

  Guido had mentioned the gold mines in this part of the city from back in the early 1800s.

  Everhart is searching for the shafts.

  Immediately I thought of the mnemonic from the back of the painting: R-U-D-I-S-I-L.

  Yeah. I liked where this was going.

  There was no sign of him, but there was a rope that led from one of the holes out to the leg of an abandoned conveyor belt on the right side of the warehouse.

  Two words came to mind: “exigent circumstances.”

  We’re allowed to enter a premises if there are exigent circumstances—which is generally interpreted as when a reasonable law enforcement official would believe that delaying entry to obtain a warrant would increase the likelihood of the destruction of evidence or allow a suspect to cause severe harm to himself or another person.

  Corrine is missing.

  Handcuffs in the van.

  That van spent the night in her neighborhood.

  The likelihood of severe harm to another person . . .

  It worked for me.

  I’m not too bad with locks so I pulled out my lock pick set, knelt beside the door, and got started.

  + + +

  Corrine’s foot tapped only at empty air. The ceiling above her ended.

  Okay.

  This was it.

  The shaft.

  It would be so easy.

  She just needed to step forward. Not even that, really—just lean, lean out into the darkness.

  Into the future.

  She stood there on the brink of life, of death, and wondered what it would be like to slip into nothingness, or everythingness, if you believed in the afterlife.

  So do you?

  What do you believe?

  Do you believe in the eternal? In the soul?

  It struck her that if there really was such a thing as justice, true justice, it would need to be meted out in the afterlife, because all too often it doesn’t happen in this one.

  Like with your brother. Like with Richard.

  And if there was an afterlife, then there must be a God. And he would not let people enter into eternity without administering justice for deeds done on the earth.

  It couldn’t be one or the other. It was both. An afterlife and justice.

  Or neither.

  Only nothingness.

  Our secrets always find us out, in this life or in the next.

  She took a deep breath.

  If there is justice, there is a God.

  If there is a God, there is justice.

  Both or neither.

  Closed her eyes.

  Opened them.

  No difference.

  The darkness around her.

  Within her.

  The laughter had stopped.

  The shivering had stopped.

  Now, Corrine. Do it.

  Justice.

  Everythingness—

  She spread out her arms as if she were going to fly, as if she were going to dive into the sea of eternity.

  And heard something in the shaft above her.

  + + +

  The bard paused in his descent.

  A moment ago he’d knocked a rock loose and he could hear it now, clattering off the beams crisscrossing the darkness far below him as it plummeted to the bottom of the shaft more than 250 feet past the entrance to the tunnel where he’d left Corrine.

  + + +

  She felt her heart hammering in her chest.

  A rock. Someone had jarred a rock loose.

  There’s someone here!

  But who?

  She listened.

  Heard nothing more.

  “Hello?” She said the word softly, unsure if she was actually speaking it aloud. Her voice was so light and airy it didn’t even bring an echo.

  No one answered.

  Holding on to the support beam beside her, she leaned out as far as she could and peered uncertainly up the shaft.

  Oh.

  There was a dot of light—more than that, a narrow beam that swept through the shaft.

  Someone was there.

  Someone was definitely there.

  No, no, no. It’s just your imagination.

  She blinked, and when she opened her eyes, the light was still there.

  It’s someone else. It’s not him. It can’t be him. It’s someone coming to help you.

  “Hello?” she yelled. And this time the sound reverberated upward through the shaft, loud and fervent and strong.

  And then she heard the reply, echoing down to her: “I’m coming, Corrine. I’ll be right there.”

  41

  Your name!

  He said your name!

  He knows your name!

  Though the acoustics of the echo made it impossible to tell if it was the same man who’d brought her here, who else would it be? Who else could it be? Who else knew she was down here?

  Her heart went wild with fear.

  It’s him. He’s back.

  Step forward. End this.

  But no.

  If you do, he wins. You can’t let him win.

  But he’ll kill you!

  Not if you can stop him. Not if you kill him first.

  The thought shocked her. The fact that she would even consider that.

  You have to do it. You have to kill him.

  You couldn’t do that, even if you—

  How?

  What? Push him down the shaft?

  No. If you try to fight him here, you’ll lose. He’s too strong. Look how easily he overpowered you in your bedroom.

  But you have to fight him—you have to!

  No. Someone else will come. Someone will follow him.

  She backed away from the edge.

  For some reason she thought of her clothes, of leaving her jeans at the far end of the tunnel by the water where she’d used them to dry off. At least she’d put her shirt back on for warmth.

  Find a rock. Fight him off. Don’t let him win.

  You can do it. You have to.

  + + +

  I pressed the door open and angled my Mini Maglite’s beam into the dim warehouse. “Mr. Everhart?”

  No reply.

  Dismal, muted light oozed through the dirt-covered windows that flanked me. My flashlight’s beam sliced through the dreariness of the abandoned factory, but the inside of this place didn’t look like simply an empty warehouse. It looked more like a construction zone.

  With a rope leading down into one of the holes.

  The Rudisill Mine?

  Evaluate, don’t assume.

  As I considered that, I couldn’t help but think of the time in Denver when the serial killer who liked to be known as Giovanni had tried to bury me alive in an abandoned gold mine in the mountains west of Denver.

  Height. Weight. They’re similar to Everhart’s driver’s license.

  Giovanni?

  The age on the DMV records was close.

  The face was different, but plastic surgery could have taken care of that.

  It would explain the bruises, the swelling.

  Giovanni had escaped from prison a few months ago. I knew that, but—

  Is it him again? Resurrected now as Danny Everhart?

  The message: I am back.

  Giovanni’s free. He tells elaborate stories of tragedy and death. He t
aunts law enforcement.

  The dates of his employment at NVDS fit in with the timeline.

  It could work.

  A coincidence?

  No. I don’t believe in them.

  Giovanni’s real name was Kurt Mason and he’d been a police lieutenant in Denver. A good one too. He’d hidden who he was incredibly well. Truthfully, it was scary how normal he’d acted in his everyday life, how well he fit in. He was a killer without a conscience, a psychopath as twisted as they come.

  The pit that lay nearest to me was about three meters wide and just about that deep.

  He knows explosives. He used C-4 in Colorado. He could have set that Semtex up in Virginia on Monday morning.

  The more I thought of Mason, the more likely it seemed that that’s who Everhart really was.

  I walked to the hole that yawned open just a little wider than the others, the one that dropped out of sight. The climbing rope that disappeared into it had been tied off with a figure-eight follow-through, the end tucked back into the knot in what rock climbers call a Yosemite backup.

  Whoever had attached it knew his knots.

  Mason does.

  I’d gone climbing with him twice.

  I scanned the warehouse. Still no movement. This was the only hole that had a rope leading into it. The stillness, the jagged slabs of unearthed concrete, the smear of filthy light coming through the windows, gave the place an eerie, unearthly feel, almost like something from the set of a horror movie.

  When I peered into the shaft I saw the flick of someone’s flashlight or headlamp far below me.

  Mason?

  An array of rock-climbing equipment sat piled on a table nearby.

  Wait for backup or go in after him?

  I was trying to decide when I heard the scream echo up from somewhere deep in the earth.

  42

  It was faint, as if the shaft were a throat emitting a sad, distant farewell to the world. It might have been a woman, might have been a man. I couldn’t tell.

  I listened carefully but heard nothing more.

  Whipping out my cell phone, I contacted police dispatch, told them who I was and that I needed them to get a unit over here ASAP. I relayed the information that I had: I’d followed a suspect—Danny Everhart, or possibly, Kurt Mason—to this location, saw cuffs in the car, and heard screams from inside the shaft.

  “The shaft?”

  “A mine shaft. It’s a long story. And tell SWAT we need anyone who’s been trained in vertical rescue and assist.”

  “Who is this again?”

  “Special Agent Patrick Bowers.” Only after giving her my federal ID number did she finally put out the call for SWAT to respond. The average national response time for police officers in urban areas is eleven minutes. I was hoping today they could beat the average.

  But until then, I wasn’t just going to stand around waiting for them.

  I grabbed a climbing harness and slipped it on.

  I recalled the last time I faced Mason in that tunnel in Colorado.

  He’d abducted a man and sliced his right wrist. The guy was bleeding, dying. While Mason stood behind him, a straight razor pressed against his throat, he had me cuff my hands behind my back. The only reason I was still alive today: I was able to pick the handcuff’s lock with the spring from my Maglite.

  I thought of that now as I slipped my flashlight into my pocket. In order to have both hands free for the rappel, I put on the headlamp that was on the table.

  I couldn’t stop thinking of that day in the tunnel—of fighting Kurt and then almost being sealed alive down there when the C-4 that he’d placed in one of the shafts blew.

  Two hundred pounds of Semtex were stolen. Only a few pounds were used at the NCAVC. That means—

  Another scream from somewhere deep within the earth.

  Go!

  There were no ascenders here to get back up the rope, but I figured I could cross that bridge when I came to it. I’d find a way back up. Right now I just needed to get down there and help whoever was hurt or in danger.

  Corrine?

  Maybe.

  No way to know.

  I cinched the harness’s waist strap tight, then using the carabiner that was clipped to the rappel device, I attached it to the harness.

  The device would create friction as the rope passed through it and that friction would slow my descent. I could control my speed by how fast I allowed the rope to move through it.

  The light that I’d seen far below me had disappeared.

  I felt the rope. It wasn’t weighted, so whoever had been on the other end was no longer there.

  I clipped in.

  Eleven minutes’ response time from when I first made the call.

  Let’s see how the CMPD did.

  I tightened my grip on the rope, leaned back, and lowered myself into the shaft.

  43

  The screaming had stopped.

  If these gold mines were anything like the mines near Denver, the shafts would drop down hundreds of feet and have tunnels fingering out from them to follow mineral veins in the rock at various levels.

  A typical climbing rope is sixty meters long, but they can also come in coils much longer than that.

  As I descended, I passed thick, rough-hewn timbers that were wedged horizontally against the sides of the shaft every two or three meters. They crisscrossed past me, far enough apart to provide space for me to rappel and for the miners, long ago, to be lowered down to the tunnels they would be working in.

  The farther down I went, the cooler it became until the temperature leveled off in what felt like the mid- to high fifties.

  I arrived at a tunnel that led toward the southwest.

  Pausing my descent, I directed the headlamp’s beam into it.

  The quartz rock must have been reasonably stable through here because there weren’t any beams propped up along the walls or spanning the ceiling. It appeared that the tunnel had been blasted directly through solid rock.

  “Hello? Corrine?” I said. “Mr. Everhart? Kurt?”

  The tunnel led out of sight into the thick darkness, swallowing my light after about ten or twelve meters as it curved to the west.

  So, explore this tunnel or rappel deeper into the shaft?

  I strained my ears listening for any more screams, but heard nothing. Just a vacant, empty stillness all around me.

  They could be in this tunnel around the corner, somewhere out of sight.

  Once again I looked at the rope trailing off beneath me. Since it led quite a ways farther down, it was logical that there would be other tunnels leading out from the shaft.

  Or it could just be that he used a longer rope than was necessary to get to this tunnel.

  Angling the light in front of me again, I studied the tunnel.

  No sign of anyone

  Go in here or look for another tunnel?

  From where I was I could see what appeared to be the entrance to another tunnel closer to the end of the rope. I couldn’t be positive, but since I had no ascenders, I needed to make sure this tunnel was clear before rappelling farther, or else I wouldn’t have any way of getting back up here.

  I kicked off the wall, swung into the tunnel, unclipped my harness from the rope, and unholstered my .357 SIG P229.

  44

  Corrine had a rock about the size of a baseball in her hand. It was small enough to hold, large enough to do some serious damage.

  She figured that if she swung it hard enough and hit him in the face or on the side of the head, it might knock him down. And if he was on the ground she could use the rock to finish the job.

  Neck, face, forehead. Get him vulnerable then smash his head in. Yes, you can do this.

  But was she capable of something like that? Of taking a person�
��s life?

  Yes.

  You are.

  Maybe she wasn’t so different from her brother after all.

  Maybe none of us are.

  The man was in the tunnel with her now.

  It took some time for her eyes to adjust to the light coming toward her, but she had backed up about fifty feet from the shaft to make him think she was afraid and was trying to get as far away from him as possible.

  She blinked her eyes against the light. “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to struggle.”

  With the light shining in her eyes, it was impossible to see his face, but he held a blade in front of him and she saw it glint wickedly in the light.

  She gripped the hidden rock and crouched, ready to go at him once he was close enough.

  + + +

  At the edge of his headlamp’s beam, the bard could see Corrine cowering on the ground. As he directed the light on her, she closed her eyes and covered them with one hand to shield them from the light.

  For some reason she had taken her pants off.

  Well.

  Alright.

  It’ll save you the effort.

  + + +

  Corrine clenched that rock and readied herself to do whatever it took to get out of this tunnel alive.

  Get him down. Knock him down.

  Then finish him off.

  Kill him, Corrine. It was almost an audible voice, venom spewing out from her soul. You can do it. Kill him, kill him, kill him.

  + + +

  The bard centered his light on her as he moved closer. “Come here, Corrine.”

  + + +

  She didn’t move, just tensed the muscles in her legs to leap at him once he was close enough and his guard was down.

  He needs to bend down, needs to be right beside you.

  He called for her to stand up.

  “No.” She eased backward away from him, staying low to the ground, keeping the rock out of sight.

  + + +

  The bard worked the blade back and forth in his hands.

  She was maybe ten feet away and she still hadn’t gotten up.

  He saw her shake with fear.

  “We have some unfinished business, Corrine.”

  + + +