The ID in the wallet had Josie’s name and a photo. And a false date of birth. She was now 22. At 18 years old, Josie was too young to actually be Special Agent Winters, but all of Detachment 1039's field operatives operated under the same Interior credentials when in the United States.
Field operative. Josie couldn’t believe it. Just a few months ago she’d been sitting in classes at her High School, waiting for graduation, and wondering what her major in college was going to be. Now she was a Special Agent, hunting down a shapeshifter. It was surreal.
Josie put her badge wallet in her pants pocket, then carefully loaded her SIG P226, .40 caliber semiautomatic handgun, and put it in the holster on her right hip. After the events at the Desert Oasis Hotel, one of the first things the Colonel had trained her on was firearms. She spent an hour in the building’s small pistol range every day.
Josie put another OIG badge on her belt and slipped her Department of the Interior ID card, hung from a lanyard, around her neck. She checked her makeup and hair, held back in a ponytail, one last time in the mirror, then took a deep breath. This was going to be a long day.
Josie turned away from the mirror and crossed to her bed. Her Government-issue blue windbreaker and her overnight bag were ready. She grabbed them up and left her room, catching one last look of Miami through her windows.
Outside her apartment, she walked quickly to the freight elevator on the north side of the building. The Colonel was already there, waiting for her inside the elevator. He was dressed similarly to Josie—khaki pants, tan desert boots, green polo shirt and blue Department of the Interior Jacket. Beside him was a large luggage cart that held two duffle bags, a black metal briefcase, two large equipment cases and his own overnight bag.
As Josie stepped in the elevator, Kenslir switched off the door hold button. The large car started moving slowly downward once the doors had shut.
“Uh, aren’t we supposed to be going up?” Josie asked Colonel Kenslir. She was watching the lights on the freight elevator as they started ticking down.
“We only use the roof helipad on rare occasions.”
Josie was confused. They were supposed to be headed over to nearby Homestead Air Force Base to catch their flight to Arizona. Josie had assumed they would catch a helicopter over—the same way she had first arrived at Argon Tower.
The floor lights ticked by slowly as the elevator descended. As they neared the first floor, Josie braced for the stop. The elevator continued on.
“I think we missed our floor,” Josie said.
“We’re taking the tunnel.”
The tunnel? Josie wished she’d had more time to study before this first mission. Or that she’d had more offers of a tour than just from PJ. There was still so much about the Detachment and their headquarters she hadn’t learned yet.
The elevator finally stopped. On sub-level two.
The doors opened slowly, revealing a concrete floor and walls. Kenslir pushed the luggage cart out and Josie followed him.
Beyond the elevator doors was a long, fifteen-foot wide hallway. Steel security doors were to the left. The Colonel headed down the hallway, pushing the luggage cart.
Josie adjusted the shoulder strap on her own overnight bag and followed, wondering what was on this level. She had been to the gym and security office one level up. She visited the gym every morning, changed into sweats, and ran the stairwell all the way to the nineteenth floor, then back again. It was great exercise, even if she wasn’t authorized to exit the stairwell on most of the levels.
Kenslir rolled his cart down the long hallway, past a small passenger elevator lobby. At the end of the hallway, he turned left, then made a turn right, finally stopping in front of heavy, steel security doors. He looked up at the small dome camera hung from the ceiling beside the doors. “Open up, Max.”
There was a buzz and clicking noise, as security deadbolts retracted. Kenslir pushed the doors open and wheeled the cart through them.
The chamber before Josie was quite large, at least the width of the building, extending from east to west. A large tiled deck extended out maybe twenty feet, then there was another fifty feet of water. Metal grated gangways extended out, over the water, where a number of small boats were tied up. Harsh fluorescent lights hung overhead.
“Where are we?” Josie asked.
Kenslir wheeled the cart toward a twenty-four foot runabout. “The dock.”
Josie looked around at the vast chamber. On the far side, over the crystal-clear water, she could see rough hewn limestone, wet and dark. To the right, extending west, was a tunnel also carved from the rock—almost twenty feet wide, and maybe fifteen feet high. It was lit every fifty feet by a single bank of floodlights hung from the ceiling. The tunnel stretched on a long ways.
“Does that go all the way to the base?”
Kenslir began putting their gear in the back of the six seat boat. “Yes. It runs alongside the canal you’ve seen top side. We drain all the water from the Tower’s sub-levels into here, then pump it into the canal to maintain this level.”
Josie looked down into the clear water. She could see it was only four or five feet deep.
“C’mon, let’s go,” Kenslir said, loading the last equipment case in the back of the boat.
Josie nodded and stepped aboard, sitting beside the pilot seat.
Kenslir slipped off the boat’s lines, then climbed in himself. He started the boat’s motors, which Josie found were surprisingly quiet.
Kenslir backed the boat out slowly, then swung it around so the nose pointed toward the tunnel.
“You know, you can swim down here if you want,” Kenslir said.
Josie was looking at large steel doors to the east, across from the tunnel. They looked wide enough for one of the boats to slip through. “Where do those go?”
Kenslir looked around at the doors, then eased the throttle forward on the boat. “Out to the canal. We can take the canal out to sea if we need to, to rendezvous with subs. We don’t use it much though.”
“Aren’t we below the level of the canal?”
“It’s a pretty big canal here—forty feet deep. But yes—the gates work like a lock, letting us raise and lower the water level. It’s mainly for mini submersible use.”
The boat surged ahead, twin waterjet engines sending up a spray behind it. The boat accelerated quickly down the tunnel.
“I’m sorry, you said I could swim here?” Josie asked, looking down into the water. If it was connected to the canal, she was worried it might have snakes or alligators in it. Right now all she could see through the clear water was limestone and a bit of sand on the bottom. She noticed the south wall of the tunnel was concrete and not the rough limestone of the north wall. The roof overhead was also concrete.
“Yes, it’s normally kept about four feet deep, but that’s all you need. It’s just under three miles from the Tower to the hangars. It’s a pretty good work out, I’m told.”
Josie was looking around the tunnel now. She noticed the lights back by the dock were now off. As they raced along, the overhead lights were turning off, one by one behind them. She hated to think what it would be like in the tunnel with no lights.
Kenslir sped along the tunnel, faster than Josie would have liked. She guessed he’d done this many, many times.
The tunnel wasn’t entirely straight—it made a few turns after the first mile and a half, turning north, then west again. Josie could picture the canal above ground in her mind, from the area maps she had studied. If the tunnel followed along beside it, they were almost at their destination.
“How close are we to the canal?” Josie asked.
Kenslir pointed to the south wall on their left. “There’s about fifteen feet of reinforced concrete, some dirt and rocks, and then the canal. They dug all this out when the building was first constructed back in 1960.”
1960, the year after Fidel Castro came to power and set up a Communist regime in Cuba. Josie remembered that from her unit history she�
��d been studying. Argon Tower had been built as a disguised array of radio antenna, eavesdropping on Cuba and most of the Caribbean. Josie found that humorous—a twenty story, black glass skyscraper in the middle of the swamp, miles from Miami. It didn’t exactly blend in. Of course, the building’s real purpose was to mask an expansion of the labs researching the Fountain.
The boat slowed now, and Kenslir made a sharp right hand turn. The tunnel was now headed north. Both walls were concrete now.
They headed on only a few thousand feet, then came to another underground dock. Kenslir steered the boat into an empty slip, and eased it to an expert stop.
This dock was a little different from the one at Argon Tower. For one, it had two armed guards in Air Force uniforms. The men in blue berets and camouflage uniforms saluted as Kenslir stepped up on the dock.
Three more, unarmed Airmen came over to the boat, and helped Josie out. Then they began loading Kenslir’s gear onto a low cart.
Kenslir greeted the five Airman by first name, shook their hands, and exchanged pleasantries. Once his gear was all loaded up, he led the way to the far side of the tiled dock. There a freight elevator awaited. Josie, Kenslir and the three unarmed Airman rode the elevator up.
The elevator opened up at ground level in a large hangar. In the middle of the hangar were two long, sleek aircraft Josie had never seen before. They were dull black in color, and vaguely resembled something out of a science fiction movie.
Kenslir saw Josie looking at the aircraft. “Not this time.”
He led Josie over to a side exit, where more armed Airmen waited. They saluted the Colonel and opened the door for him.
The bright Miami morning sun was startling after the long ride in the submerged tunnel. Josie squinted and dug in her pocket for her sunglasses. A black SUV was waiting for them. The Airmen began loading their equipment in.
Once they were loaded, the SUV, driven by another armed, blue-bereted Airman, took Kenslir and Josie from the cluster of hangars in the south eastern corner of the base over to a parking apron. There the familiar four-engined passenger jet Josie had ridden on once before was waiting. A Boeing 707, Josie had learned. Or rather, a C-135 as the military called it.
They walked up a set of stairs attached to a truck, and boarded the plane, more Airmen carrying all their gear on board. Within fifteen minutes of boarding, the plane was moving down a taxiway, readying for takeoff.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
At last the men had broken through. Pick axes shattered the last few inches of tough block, punching a hole through the millennia-old wall in the back of the cave. The men, exhausted, cheered as cool air poured out of the dark hole.
The brown-haired man pushed past his day workers, and peered at the hole. The block, roughly twenty inches across and twenty inches high, revealed nothing but inky blackness beyond.
The brown-haired man stepped back from the wall he had found with Albert Tso’s memories. The wall was hidden in the back of one of many caves that opened into the network of ravines in the area. Built millennia before, the wall was made of large cubes of hard limestone, stacked one on top of another with great precision.
The brown-haired man turned his gaze on Gualberto Soto and telepathically took control of the worker once more.
“Dig! Dig my friends!” Gualberto said in his native Spanish.
The eleven other men began tearing at the wall, dislodging the large blocks easily now that they had shattered one. Pushing and pulling, using their picks like grapnels, the men toppled the blocks—some back into the thirty-foot deep cave, some forwards, into the darkness beyond.
In just a few minutes, the men had created an opening an average-sized man could walk through, hunched over.
The brown-haired man picked up one of the many electric lanterns illuminating the tunnel, and moved to the opening.
They had breached the ancient wall at a bend in the block-lined corridor. To the right, the corridor angled up, forming stairs that were covered in collapsed stone and dirt. The entrance to the ancient tomb, possibly. Ahead, the corridor disappeared into the darkness, the walls made of the same cubit-sized blocks, the ceiling made from massive beams of limestone, and the floor made from more twenty-inch square panels of stone.
The brown-haired man stepped back and gestured for the closest man to go through first.
Miguel Gutierrez hesitated as the brown-haired man handed him an electric lantern. He had been brought here to dig, not to explore. But the ancient blocks held a promise of mystery, maybe even riches. Miguel was torn between his fear of the unknown and the promise of a share of whatever the thin gringo was searching for.
His indecision immediately evaporated as the brown-haired man seized control of his mind. With robotic movements, Miguel forged ahead, into the tunnel.
The floor beneath Miguel’s rubber-soled work boots was smooth, but covered in a fine layer of dust and grit. The light from his lantern pushed back the darkness, but the ancient corridor was too long for him to see its end in the dim light. Miguel walked forward.
Behind the day laborer, the other men slowly filed in, one after another, all moving stiffly, unnaturally, as their employer controlled them telepathically.
Miguel had walked only thirty feet when he could make out a sharp turn ahead in the corridor. A left turn, with a sharp corner.
Miguel moved forward, walking toward the corner. Just as he was about to turn to his left, he was violently shoved from the side.
Three gleaming silver spikes had suddenly erupted from the wall to Miguel’s right. The first of the waist-high spears, spaced equally across the width of the corridor, lanced through Miguel’s side, smashing through his pelvis before erupting out the other side of his body. The impact was so great Miguel was lifted off his feet and carried by the long spear around the corner, out of the view of the next man in line.
The brown-haired man broke his telepathic contact with Miguel, knowing his first decoy to be dead. He stepped forward cautiously, around the stopped men remaining.
Shining his lantern down, the brown-haired man could see the edges of the floor. The entire section of corridor floor forming the corner intersection of two corridors—the one they had come down, and the new one to the left—was actually one piece, grooved to appear as though it were a series of the floor tiles. The entire section had sunk under Miguel’s weight—probably only by the slightest fraction of an inch.
Suddenly, the spikes retracted back out of view, disappearing back into the wall they had come from. Miguel’s body was not on the spikes. It was instead now laying on the floor, his blood seeping out in two big puddles
The brown-haired man hugged the wall of the corridor, and worked his way around the corner slowly. Again, the spikes leapt out from their hidden recess. But this time they speared only air, as the brown-haired man was pressed up against the side of the corridor.
Past the obstacle, the brown-haired man moved to Miguel’s body. He rolled the body onto its back, then suddenly thrust his hand into its chest, cleaving skin and bone. Working his fingers, he found Miguel’s still-warm heart and clutched it. With an easy pull, the brown-haired man ripped the heart free.
Turning back toward his remaining eleven workers, the brown-haired man took a bite of Miguel’s heart, then reached out with his telepathic powers and moved the next man in line forward, close against the wall of the corridor.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Agent Keegan didn’t want to be there. The crime scene was at least three days old. And it was in the wrong direction.
Examining the times of death for each of the shapechanger’s last few kills, Keegan had deduced the killer was moving northwest. Instead of backtracking to Chandler, Arizona, they should be anticipating the killer’s next location.
Keegan took another bite of her breakfast burrito as she regarded the two corpses before her. Brad and Angie Kane. Suburbanites just home from a long European vacation. They’d come home and been ambushed in their own living room. Their be
ige carpet was now stained brown from the dried blood that had poured from their large chest cavities. Their partially-consumed hearts lay beside them, shriveled up.
Two technicians moved to either end of Mr. Kane, ready to pick him up and place him in a body bag.
“Hold on,” Keegan said, gulping down the last bite of her breakfast. She motioned for Victor, who was standing off to the side, looking awkward and uncomfortable. “My guy needs to examine the bodies.”
The technicians looked at each other, confused. Everything had already been photographed and cataloged. It was time to pack up the bodies and take them to the coroner.
“Hello?” Keegan said impatiently. “Do you speaky the English?”
The technicians stood up and moved to the side as Victor walked over.
“Well?” Keegan demanded, glaring at the technicians. “We don’t need an audience. Go take a smoke break or something.” She waved her hand dismissively.
The technicians slunk off, intimidated by the tiny blonde agent with the big attitude.
Victor stood silently over the Kanes, looking at them intently. They were an average-looking couple, in an average-looking home. Parents, judging from the photos he’d seen all over the living room. They had an average-looking son.
Victor didn’t think it was fair. His own parents had abandoned him when he was young. But here were loving parents, who’d raised their son. They should be alive.
“Victor!” Keegan said, snapping her fingers in his face. “We haven’t got all day. Do it.”
Victor nodded and knelt beside Mr. Kane, slowly reaching out to touch the deceased husband’s cheek.
***
Josie was breathing deeply. She was trying to keep from panicking.
“You okay?” Kenslir asked, seated beside her. They were in another SUV, their gear from the plane packed in the back. They were in Josie’s hometown, Chandler, parked on a street in a very familiar neighborhood. Jimmy’s neighborhood.
Brothers in Stone (Stone Soldiers #2) Page 4
