“I know. I still don’t like it.”
They stared at each other in the darkness, each face lit by the other’s flashlight.
“Fine,” Tracie said resignedly. “Let’s see what happens. We’ll tie a rope around your waist and I’ll—”
She stopped speaking mid-sentence as Gruber turned his flashlight back toward the trap door. He stepped into the hole and eased his weight onto the first rung of the ladder.
“Hey!” Tracie said. “That’s not safe. Just stop for a second while we plan this out.”
He didn’t listen. He stepped to the second rung, placing one booted foot on it and easing his weight down gingerly. The iron bar held and he grinned up at Tracie. “See? No problem.”
“Jesus, that was foolish,” she said, irritated. “You could have fallen to the bottom of that hole and broken your back. Hell, you still may.”
Gruber shook his head. “Listen,” he said. “This job was my life, and I’m soon to be unemployed. I’ve learned that when you have nothing left to lose, you have nothing to fear.”
“You’re not going to get fired, Gruber. You’ll still have a job when you go home.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But even if I have a job, but it’s not going to be this job. They’ll put me behind a desk analyzing data, or they’ll make me train recruits, or something else equally distasteful. You know Aaron Stallings a hell of a lot better that I do, but even I’ve heard enough about the man to know that he’ll never let me operate in the field again, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”
She opened her mouth to argue, to tell him anything was possible, that after a short hiatus spent paying his dues he might find himself a field operative again.
Then she reconsidered and said nothing. He was right, so what was there to say? By allowing the Soviet operative to swipe the Amber Room key right out from under his nose, when monitoring it had been his only job in Wuppertal, Matthias Gruber—or whatever his real name was—had sealed his fate, professionally speaking.
Tracie more than probably anyone else in the CIA knew that to be true. She had seen Stallings’s vindictiveness, had been on the other end of his ruthlessness. In many ways she was still suffering from both, operating once again in the field but unacknowledged as an agency employee, still officially relieved of duty on charges of insubordination, making her the most secret asset in an agency dependent upon secrecy above all.
She sighed deeply and changed the subject. “How does that ladder seem? Does it still feel secure?”
He flashed another smile and left unspoken the fact that he knew exactly what she was thinking.
“Feels fine to me,” he said. “Nice and solid.”
“Keep going then. Hang onto the sidebars on the ladder as you move down, and take each step very slowly. Ease your weight onto the rungs until you can determine whether they’ll hold you. If any of them feel less than solid, come back up and we’ll—”
Gruber waggled his eyebrows and disappeared into the darkness, not moving slowly or carefully. He flung himself down the iron ladder into the tunnel like a twelve-year-old boy playing explorer.
Tracie shook her head and tamped down on her annoyance. Haranguing Gruber now would accomplish nothing and might serve to make him even more reckless. Instead, she watched the beam of his flashlight bouncing and shaking as he descended. A moment later the light steadied and she knew he had reached the tunnel’s base.
“Come on down and join in the fun!” he said brightly. “No reason for me to be the only one enjoying all these spiders and snakes.”
“Wonderful,” Tracie grumbled as she slipped into the hole and onto the ladder. “I can’t wait to get started.”
36
November 19, 1987
9:25 a.m.
Under the Wuppertal Munitions Plant
Northwest of Wuppertal, Federal Republic of Germany
“Just kidding about the snakes and spiders,” Gruber said as Tracie stepped off the ladder and onto the hard-packed floor. “I’m sure they’re here, but I guess I must have scared them away. For now, at least.”
She glowered at him, knowing he couldn’t see her face in the near-total darkness but doing it anyway. She held her tongue—again—and aimed her flashlight down the tunnel. The decades-old excavation appeared arrow-straight, at least as far as she could see, which wasn’t far at all. The beams from their two lights were overmatched, seeming to wither and die, swallowed up by the black passageway.
What she could see didn’t inspire much confidence that they could safely complete their mission. The tunnel walls had been reinforced during construction using bricks and mortar, but the relentless subterranean moisture over the last four decades had weakened the structure to the point where cave-ins had begun occurring, the earth breaking through the seal of bricks and causing side walls to crumble inward.
The tunnel was still passable only because it had been dug so wide. Its width was even greater than the six-by-six opening in the factory floor above. It had been excavated far more completely than would have been necessary for a simple escape route, the size making perfect sense if Aaron Stallings’s intel regarding the treasure was accurate.
The Amber Room panels were large—Tracie didn’t think exact measurements had been included in her intel packet, leading her to believe the exact measurements weren’t known—but she had seen photographs of the room that had been taken prior to its looting in World War Two, and she knew a tunnel limited in size would not have permitted the panels to be transported below ground.
She flashed her light upward and winced at what she saw. Thick wooden beams had been used to support the ceiling, six-by-six timbers spaced a few feet apart as far as she could see down the length of the tunnel. The beams had degraded over the years even more than had the brick-and-mortar tunnel walls.
Some hung at odd angles from the ceiling, having rotted badly enough to break completely apart. Others, although still intact, bowed downward, sagging nearly to the breaking point from gravity and the incredible pressure exerted by the tons of earth suspended over their heads. Massive spider webs hung from the support beams, pulsing thick and silver and glossy in the uneven light.
“Apparently we found the hiding place for all those spiders I mentioned, Quinn.” Gruber said. His tone was light but Tracie could feel the tension behind his words. “And from the looks of those support beams, I might not have to worry about losing my job, because we may not get out of here alive.”
“Knock it off, Gruber. The damn tunnel has lasted this long, there’s no reason to think it’s going to cave in now.” Tracie was whistling past the graveyard, though, and she knew it. Worse, she knew that Gruber knew she knew it.
There were actually plenty of reasons to believe the tunnel could collapse at any moment. It had presumably sat undisturbed for more than forty years, and even the slightest change in conditions below ground now could have disastrous consequences. The vibration caused by two people climbing down an iron ladder, for example, or the inevitable dislodging of soil as they clambered over and around cave-ins, or any of a hundred other variables related to their disruption of the delicate conditions, could easily result in them being trapped underground or buried alive.
“Standing here contemplating our fate isn’t helping anything,” she finally offered. “Let’s go find that treasure.” She aimed her flashlight down the tunnel and began trudging slowly into the darkness.
Gruber, who hadn’t answered, hesitated only a moment and then fell in behind her. They wound their way forward, moving to the far right side of the tunnel and climbing over dirt piles that had resulted from long-ago cave-ins, before repeating the procedure on the opposite side of the tunnel ten or twelve feet farther along.
Furtive scurrying sounds betrayed the presence of rats, but although she played her light around as completely as she could, Tracie was unable to find even a single one. She imagined hundreds or even thousands of rats burrowing a network of tunnels behind the crumbling brick wal
ls, further weakening the structure, and shuddered involuntarily.
Twenty feet farther along they came to a cave-in bigger than any they had encountered thus far. The support beam overhead had shattered and enough earth had fallen into the tunnel to render it impassable. The only thing preventing the tunnel from being totally blocked was a thin strip at the very ceiling, a gap of no more than six inches separating the pile of dirt from the top of the passage.
But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that a boulder had fallen through the ceiling and into the tunnel. It balanced precariously about a third of the way down the pile of earth, and was plenty large enough to crush either of them should it break free and begin sliding or rolling down the pile.
“What now?” Gruber said softly.
“Now we dig.”
Tracie knelt and opened her backpack, shining the light inside, searching for the collapsible shovel she had included with her supplies. There was one inside Gruber’s backpack as well, and after a moment—and accompanied by a heavy, theatrical sigh—Tracie’s temporary partner dropped to his knees and began rummaging through his pack, reluctantly following her lead.
She pulled her shovel free a moment before Gruber did the same with his. The removable pieces had been folded together and held in place by a large elastic band. After pulling off the band and snapping the pieces into place, they would have a pair of small but rugged spades.
Fifteen seconds later Tracie began attacking the pile, working quickly but as gently as possible given the hard-packed nature of the dirt. The possibility of a cave-in brought on by the vibrations of their work continued to worry her, but moving enough of the pile to allow them to slither through and continue down the tunnel would take vigorous effort; there was simply no way around it.
Shovelful after shovelful, she lifted the moist earth free of the pile and scattered it behind them, tossing it along the tunnel floor. Next to her, Gruber did the same. They worked without speaking, heavy breathing and the occasional grunt the only sounds.
Tracie kept a wary eye on the boulder, but for the time being it showed no signs of dislodging. It had fallen into the dirt toward the left tunnel wall, so Tracie and Gruber concentrated their efforts on the right side, as far away from it as possible.
Ten minutes of steady digging lowered the pile several inches. Ten more and Tracie guessed they were close to having sufficient clearance to pass. She stepped back and bent over, hands on her knees, breathing heavily.
Gruber had stopped digging to take a break. He spit on the floor and between panting breaths said, “Remind me again why in the hell I ever wanted to do this job?”
“Glory,” she replied. “Oh, and the everlasting gratitude of your superiors in Washington.”
Gruber burst out laughing.
Tracie almost shushed him, concerned about causing further cave-ins, but decided against it. Whatever his deficiencies as a covert operative, and despite the fact he came across as a slimy womanizer, the man meant well, and his previous statements to her had made clear the fact that he was torturing himself over his failure in the field. A little laughter would do wonders for him.
Besides, she had to admit the sound lifted her spirits as well. She was at least fifteen feet underground, surrounded by rats and insects and probably snakes and who knew what else, working in secret for a boss who didn’t give a damn about her, knowing if she died down here beneath a crumbling abandoned German factory, no one would ever know what had happened.
Precious few besides her parents would even notice she was gone.
So let Gruber laugh. It would do wonders for him, but it wasn’t the worst thing in the world for her, either.
His laughter died away and he wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeves. “You’re okay, you know that, Quinn?”
“Right back atya,” she said.
“So…now that we’re bonding and getting to know each other and all, does this mean you’ll sleep with me when we get out of here?”
“Jesus, Gruber, do you ever give up?”
“You can’t blame a guy for trying. Besides, my daddy always told me you can’t catch a fish if you don’t throw your line in the water.”
“Your pole’s not coming anywhere near me, got it?”
He burst out laughing again and Tracie found herself giggling like a teenager. This might be the most surreal moment of my life, she thought. Thousands of miles from home, chasing buried Nazi treasure and fending off the advances of a handsome but disgraced spy.
She realized with a start of surprise that she was exactly where she wanted to be. She loved her job. Despite the constant loneliness and unrelenting danger, the heartbreak and the isolation and the gunshot wounds and the sociopathic boss and the unfair firing and everything else she had endured—and I’m not even thirty yet, she thought with another giggle—she loved her life.
She wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Not for a million dollars.
Not even for three hundred million dollars.
“Let’s get moving before this marvel of Nazi engineering falls down on top of us,” she said.
37
November 19, 1987
10:10 a.m.
Under the Wuppertal Munitions Plant
Northwest of Wuppertal, Federal Republic of Germany
There was now enough room to squeeze between the top of the dirt pile and the tunnel’s damaged ceiling, but just barely. Tracie went first, clawing her way up the big mound, which was now unstable, the result of being chopped at and dug out by a pair of shovels after sitting undisturbed for perhaps a decade or more.
She was nearly to the top when the loose dirt gave way and she found herself sliding back toward the ground, out of control. Gruber was standing directly below her, though, and he stopped her momentum, grabbing her with one hand on her upper right leg and another on her butt. He gave a firm shove and she was able to climb/claw/swim her way upward again, this time reaching the top thanks to the added momentum Gruber had provided.
She cracked her skull on a support beam and barely noticed. She had climbed straight into one of the thick spider webs hanging from the ceiling, and she flailed her hands and arms, brushing the webs out of her hair and off her face, feeling her stomach begin to turn. She had stared down men with guns, single-handedly rescued the sitting U.S. secretary of state, gone toe-to-toe against deadly Soviet operatives, but this was worse than all of those things put together.
Tracie hated spiders.
She realized she was moaning involuntarily and clamped her mouth shut.
From below, Gruber said, “Thanks for the free feel.”
“You’re welcome, but I’m still not sleeping with you,” she answered. She swallowed hard, choking back the bile that had threatened to spew out her mouth, doing her best to ignore the massive spider web.
She took a deep breath and then rolled onto her belly. Her upper body hung toward Gruber, and she extended her arms.
“Take my hands,” she said, “and I’ll support you while you climb.”
“First I get to cop a feel and now we’re holding hands,” he said. “I consider this extremely promising.”
“You’re relentless, aren’t you?”
“It’s part of my irresistible charm.” He reached up with both arms and they locked hands, each grabbing the other’s wrists.
“Now, climb,” Tracie said, and as his legs churned against the loose dirt, she began squirming backward, counting on gravity to take over and provide enough leverage to assist in getting Gruber’s much bulkier body up and over the mound. His face scraped the side of the pile as he climbed and she could hear him spitting dirt and coughing, but he continued moving.
When he reached the spot where she had begun sliding backward, his feet slipped exactly as hers had done. He was too heavy and she was too light, and she felt herself being pulled toward the top of the pile again as he fell back toward the tunnel floor.
She shook her left hand free of his right and reached up, ho
ping to jam her hand against the ceiling support beam and halt their wrong-direction momentum. For a half-second nothing happened, and then white-hot pain exploded through her hand as her knuckles cracked the beam and took the brunt of not just her own weight but Gruber’s as well.
She grunted and cursed.
Forced her elbow to stay locked.
All she wanted to do was bend it and take the pressure off and relieve the pain that had exploded in her hand, but she refused to yield.
Refused to give up.
Their movement stopped.
For a moment nothing happened. They hung suspended, Gruber on one side of the pile, Tracie on the other, panting and cursing and trying not to think about how many knuckles she had just broken.
“Well?” she said through gritted teeth. “Are you going to climb or are you going to take another break?”
His answer was to kick his toes into the pile in an attempt to gain traction. He moved upward a few inches, then a few more, each gain increasing the pressure against her hand and arm, both of which were now burning.
Sweat poured down her face, even in the damp cool of the tunnel, and she could feel the grip of her good hand beginning to loosen on Gruber’s wrist. “I’m losing you,” she gasped, her resolve weakening. The pain was immense and the task seemingly impossible. How much could one person take?
Finally, with one manic burst of energy, Gruber pistoned his feet against the pile like a man racing a bicycle, and at the same time, he yanked upward against Tracie’s right hand, pulling hard with no warning.
The pain exploded and she screamed, forgetting the risk of cave-ins, forgetting her fear of spiders, forgetting everything except the dozens of fiery nails being hammered into her injured left hand.
And still she kept her elbow locked.
Gruber blasted over the top of the pile, his momentum carrying him forward like a freight train, and he cracked his skull against the support beam exactly as Tracie had done, and then he flopped over the top of the pile, the relentless pressure against her hand finally falling away. She fell backward, tumbling down the far side of the pile, caring about nothing besides cradling her hand to her chest.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 93
