Criss Cross (Alex Cross) - James Patterson Page 0,33

on a navy ship.

I spotted a camera above the door.

That wasn’t good. I studied the camera and the angle it was aimed at, then moved west again. When I was out of its range, I went to the side of the bunker and sneaked back toward the entrance.

When I got closer, I squatted down, grabbed some loose damp soil, and spit in it to make it muddier. With my back to the wall, I edged along the anthill until I was underneath the camera.

Then I reached up and smeared the lens with the dirt.

I noticed a humming noise coming from the other side of the door. A generator? Then I caught a faint squeal. Or was it a cry?

I pulled my shirtsleeve over my hand to prevent fingerprints and tugged on the padlock. To my surprise, the hasp was not fully engaged. The lock opened.

Either Rivers had made a mistake or he planned to come back soon. I prayed it was a mistake, removed the padlock, and turned the hatch wheel. It spun easily, as if it had recently been greased.

The door swung quietly toward me.

I stepped inside and saw a short hallway lit by dim, red overhead lights leading to a metal staircase. The humming was louder now; it was definitely some kind of machine running.

I hesitated and then walked far enough to my right to look up at the house with the binoculars. No one on the other side of those windows that I could see.

I went back, set the padlock in the latch, stepped inside, and pulled the hatch door snug behind me.

CHAPTER 37

AFTER WAITING A FEW MOMENTS to let my eyes adjust to the dim red light, I crept down the hallway toward those stairs. I paused there, remembering reading in the dossier that at least twenty-five container cars were buried belowground and that there were five or six above in the cone of the anthill.

The stairs both up and down were unlit. Below me, the stairs dropped into darkness, and that gave me a claustrophobic feeling even when I turned on the flashlight and shone it down the shaft.

The workers who’d helped Rivers build the anthill had described it as a maze belowground, the kind of place you could easily get lost in. And at the back of my mind, there was the nagging possibility that the padlock had been left open on purpose because the prepper was coming right back.

My cell phone buzzed. A Wickr text from Ali: Home! So much fun! Captain W is a beast on a mountain bike!

I hit the thumbs-up emoji, wrote, Working. I will call you later.

Then I stood there, straining to hear if someone was calling for help, but I heard nothing except that hum, which seemed to boil up from below. I glanced at my watch. Twenty-two minutes had passed since I’d left Sampson.

I decided to climb. I flicked on my little flashlight, went up a flight, and found small doors, one on either side of the landing. Both were unlocked.

The container car on the left held shelves stocked deep with food supplies. The one on the right was set up as an emergency medical facility and had a safe that I assumed held medicine.

I climbed up another flight and found two more doors. The container car on the right was the armory. The place smelled lightly of oil and solvent. There were at least eighty assault rifles in racks and three hunting-style rifles with scopes.

The container car on the left was an ammo dump, with crate after crate of 5.56x44mm NATO surplus ammunition. I looked around and saw a crowbar but recognized the futility of trying to open every crate to see if it held anything but bullets. There were just too many.

I went up the next flight of stairs and found a fifth container car, this one with three workstations and an array of computers and monitors, all dark except for two set up on a bench in a corner.

Those two screens were each split into four quadrants that showed real-time feeds from security cameras. It was obvious which feed came from the camera over the door: you couldn’t see a thing because of the mud I’d smeared on it. The next three feeds on that monitor seemed to be from cameras fixed high on the anthill; they showed various angles of the darkly shadowed meadow.

Had I been seen? No, I decided.

The next feed was a wide-angle shot that showed the road to the house