have the area surrounded?”
“As best we can without getting too close.”
“Just make sure if he leaves that fenced-off area, he can’t get by you.”
“I don’t like this,” Kate said again. “At each turn, we’re losing more control.”
Vail had reached the mouth of the tunnel. The arched entrance was an almost perfect half circle about twenty feet high. It had been sealed up with cinder block and coated with a concrete plaster. Like the substation, it shimmered electrically with graffiti of all colors in the low light.
The glowstick arrow in the substation indicated that Vail was supposed to go to the top of the opening. Around the left side of the entrance was a small pathway up the steep grade. It ran between the huge concrete frame of the tunnel and the chain-link fence. He shifted the heavy bag more toward the middle of his back and maneuvered up the thirty-degree grade. At the top of the structure, he started walking, following the tunnel’s spine along its mile-long length, looking for the next instruction.
Seventy-five yards farther he found another glowstick, attached to a small metal door in the ground. It appeared to be a hatch for maintenance workers if access became necessary to work on the electrical lines that ran along the tunnel’s ceiling. A rusty padlock that had secured the hatch had been cut and lay next to it. The thick metal door was ajar. Judging by the piles of dirt and stone around it, the entrance had been covered over and somehow the extortionists had found it and dug it out.
Under the glowstick was another note.
Remove the other tracking device and leave it next to the opening. Then take the money and enter the tunnel. Do not use lights—tunnel rigged with explosives and photocell trigger.
Once again, the Pentad had anticipated more than one tracking device. Vail took out the low-light monocular and scanned the surrounding area to determine if any of the surveillance agents were close enough to observe where he was going. He couldn’t see any.
Down inside the hatch were individual U-shaped ladder rungs that were anchored into the concrete wall. Below them, another glowstick arrow sat flat on the floor, pointing toward the remaining mile of the tunnel. Vail then used the monocular to look more closely at the floor of the tunnel. He could see small glints of light surrounding the luminescent marker. Taking a handful of pebbles that had been cleared from around the hatch, he tossed them in as long a pattern as possible. The sound of stone plinking off metal echoed lightly from below. He refocused the monocular to get a better look and could now see that the floor was booby-trapped with long nails hammered up through boards.
Vail wondered if it was a bluff that the tunnel was rigged to explode. The glowsticks wouldn’t give off enough light to trigger a photocell, so he had no choice but to assume it was true. The one thing that was certain was they wanted him to proceed in the dark. Was it so he would jump down onto the punji boards? Or was there another reason?
He eased the GPS wallet out of his back pocket and set it down carefully to mark where he was last aboveground for the surveillance teams. Then he lowered the bag through the hatch ahead of him and started down the metal rungs. Once he was completely clear of the hatch, he pulled both straps of the bag over his head so they sat cross-chest and then shifted the weight completely behind him.
He stepped down two more rungs, and as he was testing the next one, the hatch was slammed closed. Then he heard a lock being snapped shut. It was followed by dirt and gravel being shoveled back over the hatch.
IN THE MAJOR-CASE ROOM, the headquarters tech agent watched the monitors intensely. “What happened? We’ve lost transmission for the GPS in the bag. He must have dropped it and the weight of the money disabled it. Wait, the wallet device is still moving.”
“Which way?” Kaulcrick asked.
“It’s moving east.”
“All units, the package is moving east from the last location,” the assistant director barked into the microphone. “Can someone get an eye on him? Don’t lose that money!”
“This is One-four. It’s pretty dark, but I see something moving. Let me try to get over there.”
“Don’t get too close, we don’t know who’s around.”
The tech agent, watching the grid on the monitor, said, “He’s now walking up Emerald Street.”
“Does anyone have