Criss Cross (Alex Cross) - James Patterson Page 0,38

my light through the side windows, saw files on the seat and keys in the cup holder.

There was no padlock on the hatch. Sampson covered me while I turned the wheel and pulled the door open. Hearing that hum belowground again, I led the way to the staircase.

I paused, listening, but heard nothing except that hum. I’d just decided to take a step down when I thought I heard a faint wail from far below us.

“You hear that?” I whispered.

Sampson shook his head. “What?”

“Could have been a scream or a cry,” I said, and I started down with more conviction and more speed, Sampson behind me.

We stopped at the first landing but found two padlocked doors.

On the next landing down, one door was not locked, and it opened. We looked into a container car set up as a kitchen and pantry with two tables and chairs. It smelled of cat urine from a litter box by the door.

There was a second door at the far end of the galley, but we didn’t check it. I was sure that shrill sound had come from somewhere deeper in Rivers’s anthill.

The single door off the third landing opened as well. Instantly the humming sound was louder. I spotted a light switch and hit it. We were in the bunker’s power plant of battery packs and electrical motors fed by the solar arrays in the field above.

There were two other doors off the power plant, but I decided to wait to explore them, reasoning that I could not have heard the scream or whatever it was over the sound of the motors.

“I’m not liking this, Alex,” Sampson said.

“We’ll go down to the bottom, one more level, then work our way back up.”

He seemed to struggle with the idea and then shrugged. “We’ve come this far.”

“That’s my man.”

“What the hell do we do if we encounter Rivers?”

“Depends on what he’s doing and who he’s with.”

“I’m saying I don’t want to have to shoot in here. The walls are all steel.”

“Then we won’t shoot,” I said and started down again.

There were two doors off the bottom of the staircase. The one on the left opened into a container car that held an elaborate water-filtration system and pump.

As we moved to the door on the right, we heard a loud clang on the other side.

“Someone’s home,” I muttered, raising my pistol and lifting the latch.

CHAPTER 43

THE DOOR OPENED INWARD AND revealed a lit workshop with neat racks of supplies on one side and workbenches and lockers and cabinets on the other. There was no one in the long rectangular space, and the steel door at the far end was ajar.

“Let’s move,” I whispered. “He slammed that door on his way out, but it didn’t catch.”

Single-minded, I started through the workshop, intent on getting to the opposite end and through that door as fast as possible.

Sampson grabbed my shoulder before I could go through.

I spun around, confused and annoyed. John looked stricken as he pointed to a workbench by the lockers. The bow saw was on it. Beside it, there was a reciprocating saw coated in blood and gore. There was blood on the floor below the bench and drops of blood leading toward a locker that was half open.

We walked over a few feet, enough to see a man’s severed head on the shelf inside the locker. He was Caucasian, late thirties or early forties. His dull eyes stared out, and his mouth was frozen open.

We heard another clang, this one above us somewhere.

“Our boy’s getting out of Dodge,” I said. I twisted around and ran through the second door, Sampson right behind me.

We entered a short hallway that had a metal ladder bolted into one wall. I shone my light up it and saw that it climbed into a shaft of corrugated steel that looked like a culvert.

In the flashlight beam, dust and dirt swirled.

“He went up,” I whispered, holstering my pistol and getting on the ladder. “Go back to the staircase, make sure he doesn’t get out of here that way.”

Sampson didn’t argue and went back toward the workshop as I climbed up into the shaft, the flashlight in my left hand. The culvert was big enough to let me through but not so large that it quelled the dreadful feeling of claustrophobia that threated to overtake me the higher I got.

Gritting my teeth, I focused on each rung in the ladder and kept climbing. Twenty feet up, the ladder went through a hole in