end, the corridor turned right toward the building’s main entrance. There was light from the street coming through the double door windows. To his right was a large open door that led to the floor’s workspace.
Then he noticed, sitting six feet from the entrance door, an object that was four feet tall and three feet wide. He stepped slowly toward it. It looked like an industrial-size cable spool for heavy-gauge wire. After another step, he could see that it was coiled with hundreds of feet of barbwire. It didn’t make any sense until he looked at the core. It was packed with something light in color. Thin electrical wires ran out of it toward the door. Carefully he stuck his finger into the center of the spool. The material had the consistency of C-4. He was afraid to move any closer, but instead took out the monocular and traced the wires visually. They ran to two electrical contacts, one on each of the front doors, like a burglar alarm. As soon as either door was opened, the electrical signal was interrupted and the blasting caps at the core of the spool would be detonated. Any person or persons entering through that door had no chance of survival.
Ever so slowly, he pulled the blasting caps out of the C-4. Stepping around the spool, he laid them on the floor. Not wanting to get any closer to the doors, he took the sharp, claw end of the Halligan and drove it accurately into the wooden floor, severing both wires, one with each side of the claw. He picked up the caps and tossed them down the hallway as far as possible. Blasting caps were relatively inert. Even if they went off at that distance, they couldn’t detonate the stable C-4. Vail knew the bomb was not for him, but rather for any FBI cavalry should they somehow be tracking Vail’s movements. If there was an “obstacle” for him, it lay somewhere else.
He pulled the Halligan out of the floor and looked through the inner door into the workspace. The windows had been drywalled over. Only a thin slit of a window at the back end of the room allowed any light at all. Using the monocular, Vail could see a dozen or so dark shapes of uniform size placed irregularly along the floor. The pattern seemed to be random, but Vail could see that it was arranged so that eventually, in the dark, anyone walking through the room would bump into one of them, and possibly with the same consequences as entering through the front door. After memorizing their positions, he gripped the Halligan at its balance and stepped into the room.
Immediately he heard a woman’s desperate moans. She was somewhere inside the large room. Straining his eyes to confirm the location of the objects along the floor, he slid each foot forward, testing for trip wires while continuing to move toward the voice.
Halfway across the room, he stopped and took out the monocular. He could see the outline of a coffin-shaped box along the far wall where the muffled syllables seemed to be coming from. This was where he was supposed to become emotional and charge toward it. He stopped, took a deep breath, and blocked out the muted pleas.
The objects placed between him and the box containing her turned out to be eighteen-inch-high wooden cubes. He could now see a small green dot of light up on the wall, and he suddenly became aware of an almost inaudible hum, an electrical hum. The transmitter for the baby monitor? He took one more step forward and felt the floor give way slightly, causing a distinct mechanical click underfoot.
A small spotlight snapped on, illuminating what housed the green point of light. It was a motion detector, the kind used in home security systems, and its green light had changed to red, indicating it was now armed. He froze. Illuminating it meant that Radek now had him trapped and wanted him to know.
He was standing on a two-foot square of plywood, which had been painted flat black to make it unnoticeable. He suspected that the click heard under it might have done more than turn on the light. Vail turned his attention back to the sensor. Ordering himself not to move his head, he used eye movement only. A snarl of wiring surrounded the monitor. It was hooked into a larger cable, which ran up the wall and then overhead toward him, finally