Lee CHILD - Better off Dead

“They must exist. Dendoncker had to have seen them. You said he made an effort to get this particular house. There has to be a reason for that. And it’s not the view. Trust me. He must have realized it gave access to what’s essentially a system of tunnels.”

“Seems likely. But there’s no guarantee he found the information online. That’s the problem. If it was on paper, in a book, he had a year to sniff it out. Your missing woman doesn’t. He could have been poking around in libraries. Municipal archives. Do you have time for that? And wherever it was, how many copies were there? He could have stolen them. Or destroyed them to protect his secret.”

“You’re saying it’s hopeless?”

“No. I’m saying I’ll try. Just don’t hold your breath.”

I went back outside and crouched at the side of Sonia’s car. She rolled down her window and I saw that her eyes were red and swollen again.

She said, “I’m sorry. I just had a crazy vision of you coming out and saying you’d found Michael. That he was OK after all.”

I said nothing.

“You haven’t. Have you?”

“No. I wish I had.”

“Did you find anything?”

“The entrance to a tunnel. I don’t know where it goes. Yet.”

Sonia reached for the door release. “I’ll come with you.”

“No. It looks like the kind of place you go in, you might not come back out.”

“I don’t care.”

“I do.”

“But you’re going anyway?”

I nodded. “I have to. Michael’s sister could be at the other end.”

“Michaela?”

“Right.”

“I hope you find her. I hope she’s OK.”

“Do you know her?”

“No. We’ve never met. But I heard all about her. I hoped one day she’d be my sister-in-law.”

I waited until Sonia’s taillights had disappeared around the corner then went back into the house. I paused at the top of the ladder. Felt a prickle spread between my shoulder blades. Ignored it. Climbed down. Went through the concealed door. And looked into the tunnel. It seemed like the rails were pointing into the distance. It was an illusion, of course. A trick of perspective. But I still wanted to know where they went. And why they were there at all.

Dendoncker must have installed them. There was no place for them in a functioning sewer. Or drain. Plus they looked new. Newer than the surrounding brickwork, anyway. There was no sign of rust. The steel was shiny. It had recently been used. Polished by metal wheels running along it. Probably some kind of truck. Probably carrying Dendoncker’s smuggled contraband. In which case it must link to a storage facility. Another house he took over. Or an abandoned pumping station. Someplace like that.

Which didn’t make sense. Why not just drive the stuff to and from the depot from there? Why move it around underground and load it up here? It called for extra effort. Extra resources. Extra time. I couldn’t see how it reduced the risk. But whatever the reason, I wanted to know where the other place was. I would rather ambush Mansour there, where he felt safe. From a direction he wasn’t expecting. I didn’t want to stalk him through the tunnel. That option didn’t appeal to me at all. But the only alternative was to wait for Wallwork. To see if he found a map. He wasn’t confident. There was no guarantee it would be conclusive. And there was no way of knowing how long it would take him.

I checked that the pack of matches was in my pocket. Retrieved the tarnished mirror. Stepped through the hole in the wall. Into the tunnel. And started to walk.

The temperature in the tunnel was cool. It was surprisingly comfortable. But the air quality was a different story. It was foul. Stale. It felt thick and dusty as I breathed it in. I fought the urge to turn back. Or if I had to keep going, to cover the ground as fast as possible. I forced myself to move slowly. To make as little noise as possible. I finally got into a rhythm, stepping on every third tie and pausing in the relative shadow between each pool of light thrown by the bulbs on the ceiling. I kept going for a hundred yards. To the point where the gradient increased. Then the presence of the rail track suddenly made sense.

From the base of the incline I could see how far the tunnel continued. Another four hundred yards. At least. It climbed all the way. But it was dead straight. I pictured the position of the border in relation to the house. Calculated the distance to the buildings on the far side. The ones I’d seen when I first entered the town with Fenton. It all added up. I thought about the WPA guys arriving all those years ago. How they must have seen things. They faced two challenges. Too much water. And gravity. They couldn’t make the water disappear. They couldn’t make it run uphill. And they didn’t want it to keep flowing down and flooding the northern part of the town. So they must have gone lateral. Recruited gravity as an ally. Turned it to their advantage. And joined up the drainage systems.

To guys in the 1930s it must have seemed like a practical solution to a natural problem. They were engineers, not politicians. Not border guards. The world was different in those days. Before they had to worry about drugs. Cartels. Border walls. Back then they would have seen two halves of a town separated by an arbitrary line on a map. They would have thought their work was making life better for the people who lived there. Now it looked more like they were setting up a smuggler’s dream. No wonder Dendoncker chose that town. And that house. He was no fool. That was becoming clearer all the time.

I kept going up the slope. At the same speed. With the same rhythm. The farther I went the more obvious it became that this underground supply route hadn’t just fallen into Dendoncker’s lap. As I gained height I passed a bunch of newer sections of brick. The patches were circular. And dished. They followed the contours of the wall. There must have once been lots of smaller channels that were now blocked off. Dendoncker must have done his homework. He must have come across the records of the work. Including a diagram. The system would have looked like a tree. A broad, straight trunk with thinner branches sprouting off right and left. The branches would run beneath the southern part of the town. Collecting the excess water. And carrying it to the trunk. That was the key. None of it originated in that central section. So, when Dendoncker chopped off the branches, he was left with a dry tunnel. I don’t know what other impact it would have had. Maybe the population had shrunk to the point there was no longer enough water to be a problem. Maybe it rained less these days. Maybe the floods had started happening again. But whatever the outcome, I doubted Dendoncker cared. Not as long as he could roam back and forth beneath the border, carrying anything he wanted in his little railroad between two parts of a sleepy town that no one paid any attention to.

The original tunnel ended after four hundred and twenty yards. Or maybe it began there, as that was its maximum height and water ran downhill. I came to a wall made of the same pale yellow bricks. It had the same flaky surface. But the tracks veered to the left. They turned ninety degrees and disappeared through another hole. There was another steel girder at the top. And more jagged edges down both sides where the bricks had been chipped away.

I moved in close to the wall and used the mirror to look around the corner. The track only continued for ten extra feet. A rail truck was parked at the end in front of a concrete wall. It was long enough for four people to sit, single file. Or for a decent amount of cargo to be carried. There was room for a variety of sizes of boxes and containers. Like the kind Dendoncker transferred to private planes under cover of his business. A cable snaked away from the side of the truck. It was thick. Heavy-duty. Plenty of amps could flow down it. Plenty of power. It stretched all the way to a gray box on the far wall. I figured the truck was battery-powered. That was smart. It was much easier to press a button than push something that size up the grade. Empty, let alone fully loaded.