by Joel Goldman
“I don’t know. Malcolm used the second bedroom as an office. Have a look if you like.”
Bridges’ office was neat and orderly. Pens and pencils arranged in rows. No papers lying loose on the desk blotter. A laptop computer was plugged in, the lid closed. Cassie opened it, not surprised that it was password protected. She went back to the kitchen.
“Do you happen to know the password for your husband’s computer?”
Mrs. Bridges frowned. “I don’t know that I should tell you something like that.”
“I don’t blame you, but I might find something that would help us find him.”
She considered that for a moment. “It’s Gladys2311. I’m Gladys and my birthday is November 23.”
Cassie plugged a flash drive into the laptop and downloaded everything on the hard drive, not wanting to take the time to sort through it now. When she returned to the kitchen, Gladys had folded her arms on the table and lowered her head, crying softly. The doorbell sounded. She looked up at Cassie.
“Would you like me to get that?”
“Please. I haven’t the strength.”
Cassie made the short walk to the door and opened it. Inspector Gerald Murdoch gave her a bemused smile. Her eyes widened and she sucked in a breath, chiding herself for her involuntary reaction, knowing that it would add to whatever suspicions Murdoch had. The moment passed and she gave him a welcoming smile.
“Hello, Inspector.”
“Good day, Ms. Ireland.” He paused, taking in the bruising on her face. “Are you quite alright?”
“Yes. Just clumsy. I ran into the bathroom door in my hotel room in the middle of the night.”
He raised an eyebrow. “The night can be quite hazardous. You never know what can happen in the dark. Do be more careful.”
“Not to worry, Inspector.”
“Good, then. I wasn’t aware that an audit of the British Library would be so broad as to bring you here.”
“We try to be thorough. Malcolm Bridges worked for Titan Security Systems. He designed the security for the Magna Carta exhibit. He’s no longer at the company. I hoped to catch him at home but he’s not here.”
“No, I don’t suppose he is. Pity, though. Perhaps he could have explained those mysterious sensors.”
Gladys hurried to the door. “Who is it? What’s wrong”?
“Mrs. Bridges, I’m Inspector Murdoch, Metropolitan Police, Serious Crimes Command.”
“Oh, dear God. What’s happened?”
“May I come in?”
“Of course,” Gladys said. “It’s Malcom, isn’t it?”
Murdoch stepped inside. “Let’s sit down, shall we?”
Cassie sat next to Gladys on the sofa in the sitting room and held her hand, sensing what was coming.
“I’m afraid it’s about your husband,” Murdoch said. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that he’s dead.”
“Dear God,” Gladys gasped.
Cassie rose and motioned Murdoch into the kitchen.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Mr. Bridges was found in the front seat of his car in an underground garage, strangled. Should I wonder whether his murder is related to your security audit?”
Cassie pointed to the mail on the kitchen table. “He was a gambler on a losing streak. I’d wonder about that.”
TWENTY-ONE
JAKE FAST-FORWARDED THROUGH the footage from the security cameras covering the front, back and staff entrances to the Library, stopping when he saw any shadow that could possibly be a man. The thieves didn’t appear.
Frustrated, he switched from the video to the library’s design and construction plans, searching for any pipes, vents or passages big enough to crawl through. Two and a half hours later, he had nothing to show for it but the beginnings of a headache.
The door opened and Sarah came in. “Have you found anything?”
“Not yet,” Jake told her. “And, honestly, I don’t think I will. These guys planned for everything. They must have come up with a way to get out of the building undetected.”
“But how? Every possible exit is monitored.”
“There must be one that isn’t. One that nobody knows about.” Jake stood over the map of the Library still spread across the desk and put his finger on the Manuscript Storage room. “And since this is the last location we have for them, it has to be there, somewhere.”
“It isn’t,” insisted Sarah. “Cassie searched that room thoroughly, and there is no other exit.” Jake raised an eyebrow. “All right then.” She came around to where he was sitting, edging him out of the way and opened one of her desk drawers. “Here.” She handed him a key card attached to a lanyard. “This will get you in. Go see for yourself.”
He took it. “Thanks.”
Jake rode the elevator down to Basement Level Five and let himself into the Manuscript Storage room. Though the room was massive, he was most interested in the exterior walls. They were concrete, painted white and seamless. No sign of a button that would magically open a secret door. And the room was spotless. If the thieves had burrowed through a floor or wall, they’d have left a mess Cassie wouldn’t have missed.
He leaned against the wall, pretending he was the thief, wondering how he would play his hand. The wall began to vibrate, interrupting his thoughts. At first, it was so slight he thought he was imagining the sensation. Then it picked up as if an electric current was buzzing through the concrete accompanied by a distant rumble that soon became a deafening roar. He stepped away from the wall as it began to tremble. He was certain of one thing. The walls were solid. The thieves would have had to blast their way through them.
“Oi, there.” Jake jumped and spun around. A slight man in an olive colored maintenance uniform grinned at him. He was gaunt and gray, as if he hadn’t seen the sun in a long time. His first name, Timothy, was stitched onto the uniform. “Didn’t mean to spook you.”
“That’s alright. This place is like a giant tomb.”
Timothy started to say something but stopped when another train sped past, causing the walls to shudder and growl again.
“Aye, it is a tomb of sorts for all of them dusty, old books and such. I’ve been here since the Library opened and I can count on one hand the number of visitors I’ve had.”
“Must get lonely.”
Timothy stared at Jake. “Suits me just fine. Them that does venture this far down have their credentials but I don’t see yours.”
“Credentials?”
Timothy pulled a plastic ID card clipped to his belt with a retractable cord. “One of these. Shows you got business being down here.”
“Oh, sorry. Haven’t had a chance to get one yet. I just got here this morning. I’m working with Sarah St. James.” Jake fished his key card from his pocket. “She let me borrow this and told me to have a look around in here. You can call her if you’re worried I might walk off with an ancient manuscript.”
“Ha! Little as anyone pokes their nose down here, nobody’d notice if you did. Don’t stay down here too long or the ghosts might get you,” Timothy said with a wink before leaving Jake alone.
Jake waited until Timothy disappeared before exploring more of the Manuscript Room. He opened the door to the equipment room when he heard Cassie’s voice behind him.
“Sarah told me I would find you down here.”
“How’d you do with Malcom Bridges?”
“He wasn’t home. I was having a nice chat with his wife, Gladys, when our friend Inspector Murdoch showed up and told us Bridges had been murdered.”
“Holy crap!”
“No kidding. His body was found in his car in an underground parking garage. He’d been strangled, which is a tough way to kill someone. You’ve got to be very strong and very motivated.”
Jake let out a long breath. “Bridges made a bad bet trusting these guys. They’re thieves and killers.”
“Having second thoughts about going after them?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Makes i
t easier in a way.”
“You prefer killers to thieves?”
“Look, the robbery was planned to perfection, no detail left to chance. Hell, we don’t even know how they got out of the building. These guys are smart. But killing Bridges was a mistake because it’s going to bring the cops into the case. They just turned a winning hand into a longshot, which means they’re probably going to take more risks. And the more chances they take, the better our odds.”
“Except those risks could get us killed. Which is why I told Sarah about Bridges. I want to keep her as far in the background as possible. When she told me where you were, I thought I better get down here before you got in trouble.”
Jake pointed at his chest. “Me? In trouble? Not likely?”
“No. More like inevitable.”
“What are you doing down here? It must not have taken you very long to get through all that video.”
Jake shrugged. “The video was making me cross-eyed. Basement Level Five is the last place we know for certain the thieves were. There has to be another way out.”
“And you think you’re going to find it in this walk-in closet? I already searched it and didn’t find anything. Why are you so interested in it?
“I wasn’t until you told me you’d already checked it out.”
Jake pulled the mops, brooms and buckets out of the equipment room. Then he reached through the shelves to tap on the walls. Cassie watched from the doorway, arms crossed over her middle.
He studied the large piece of equipment in the corner. Sitting on a thick, black rubber mat, it had a half-moon housing over a round, heavy duty brush, wheels at each corner and a pair of handles in the rear. “This thing looks like a cross between a riding mower and a miniature Zamboni. What the hell is it?”
“It’s a floor scrubber.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because, dummy, it says so on the label next to the bottom of the housing.”
“Oh.”
He wedged himself behind the handle bars and maneuvered the scrubber out of the closet. Then he rolled back the rubber mat. There was a two square-foot concrete panel cut in the floor beneath where the scrubber and the mat had been.
Jake crouched next to the panel. The cut in the floor was too narrow for his fingers. Cassie nudged him aside. She was holding a pry bar.
“Found this on one of the shelves,” she said.
She angled the claw end of the bar into the cut until she felt it catch, then levered it back, lifting the panel. Jake grabbed it and set it aside. They leaned over the opening, peering into a shaft leading to a pitch-black tunnel.
“Son of a bitch,” Jake said.
TWENTY-TWO
“I SEARCHED THIS ROOM. How the hell did I miss a trap door?” Cassie said.
“I checked the plans for this floor after I got cross-eyed watching videos. It’s not on there. And, it was hidden under the floor scrubber and the mat. Easy to miss. I just got lucky.”
Cassie knew that Jake hadn’t gotten lucky. He was smart and she had been careless. And he had the decency not to remind her. That’s what a good partner did.
“Lucky or not, it’s great work.” Cassie knelt next to the opening. “The floor is a foot thick but the panel is only a couple of inches thick. It was cut to fit the opening. There’s a lip around the edges of the opening that it sits on. See if you can find a flashlight on one of those shelves.”
Jake rummaged around until he found two and handed one to her. Side-by-side, they shined their lights into the shaft. An iron ladder was bolted to the brick surface. Their beams reflected off water running past in the tunnel a good twenty feet below. They gagged and covered their mouths.
“Shit,” Jake said.
“Without a doubt. And probably worse stuff than that. Before the library was built, probably long before, this shaft must have been used to get into the sewer. The foundation buried it. These guys found it and figured out they could drill their way into the library without anyone knowing.”
“Yeah, but that would have made a hell of a racket. Somebody would have noticed.”
Another train flew past, the rattle and roar too loud for them to talk.
“Not with all that noise,” Cassie said after the train passed. “All they had to do was time the drilling with the train schedules. Then cover the panel with the rubber mat and the floor scrubber.”
“After the robbery, the last one down the shaft would have pulled the panel back in place. Someone on the maintenance crew must have put the mat and the scrubber back without giving it another thought.”
“And even if the shaft was discovered, the thieves would have been long gone. All right, let’s get down there.”
He waved gallantly at the open manhole. “After you, boss.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“How about team leader or captain, my captain?”
“Stick with Cassie and do as I say.”
She tested the top rung of the ladder making certain it would hold their weight. Satisfied, she climbed down. Jake followed her. The ladder ended six feet above a tunnel. They dropped from the ladder into a stream of sewage that soaked them halfway up to their knees. The tunnel was rounded and made of brick, tall enough that they could stand. There was a paved ledge on both sides, wide enough for a rat scurrying past them with a half-gnawed chicken bone in its mouth but too narrow for them to walk on.
Cassie raised one shoe above the surface, shaking her black suede pump.
“Crap. That’s five hundred dollars down the drain.”
“Literally,” Jake said.
“If you don’t mind the smell, this is the perfect escape route. These tunnels go all over London.”
“Which way do you think they went?”
She traced her light in both directions. The thin beam vanished after twenty feet.
“No way to know. They were carrying documents worth a hundred million pounds and a duffel bag full of equipment so they had to go slowly and carefully. If it were me, I’d want to get as far away as I could as quickly as I could but I wouldn’t risk getting the Magna Cartas wet any longer than I had to.”
“Why don’t we go back up and find a map of the sewers. That way we can identify their most likely route.”
She aimed her flashlight at him. “Afraid of getting a little dirty?”
“Too late for that.”
“They could have split up and gone in different directions. Our best bet is to stay down here and try to pick up their trail. You’re a gambling man. Pick a direction.”
Jake shrugged and pointed to their right. “Good as any.”
Cassie walked past him in the opposite direction, stopping ten feet from the ladder when the beam of her flashlight revealed a smudge on the wall. “Check this out.”
He picked his way through the sludge to join her. “What is it?”
“I think it’s a hand print.” She held up her hand next to it for comparison. “And it’s aimed downward just a bit, like the person was moving. Falling.”
She took a step back, then mimed losing her balance in the stream, flailing out a hand to catch herself against another part of the wall, leaving a similar hand print.
“You’re right,” said Jake. “But for all we know, the person who fell could have been some random sewer maintenance guy.”
“Or it could have been someone who doesn’t spend all day walking around down here. Like our thieves. I think this is the way they went.”
“So, why did you ask me to pick the direction if you were going to go the other way?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “Okay, I get it. This isn’t a guessing game.”
She smiled. “Let’s get going.”
They moved slowly at first, avoiding clumps of debris that clung to the brick, as they looked for other signs of the thieves’ passage. They reached a Y-shaped junction where two smaller tunnels joined to form the one they were in.
Jake said, “Your call but don’t guess.”
Cassie
peered down both passages, saw nothing helpful, then decided, “Let’s stay right.”
She picked up a twisted fork lying on the ledge that looked it had been thrown down a garbage disposal. She used one of the tines to scratch a line in the brick beside the right tunnel.
“What are you doing?”
“Marking our route. Works better than bread crumbs. We don’t want to end up wandering around in circles down here.”
He shook his head. “Where did you learn all this stuff? Asset recovery school?”
“I got an A+ in sewers.”
TWENTY-THREE
HALF AN HOUR LATER, they hit a dead end. A steel grate across the tunnel cut them off. Jake examined the lock which had rusted shut.
“Nobody’s opened this thing for a long time.”
