William Rabkin - A Fatal Frame of Mind

Gus would have breathed a sigh of relief, but all the air had been pressed out of his lungs by Kitteredge’s bulk. He squeezed closer to the professor. Or thought he was squeezing closer; it was hard to tell. But he felt the scrabbling move across his legs, and Malko didn’t curse him out again, so he assumed he had done the right thing.

“Anyone got ideas on what we should do to pass the time?” Shawn said. “I was thinking about a game of tennis.”

Gus heard Malko mutter a curse under his breath. At least, he hoped that’s what he’d heard. If it wasn’t the hunchback, that meant there really was someone or something locked in the closet with them. And while Gus liked to think he was generally a level-headed person immune from irrational panic attacks, he couldn’t help recalling the scene from C.H. U.D. in which one of the cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers reached up through a manhole and dragged an innocent passerby and her little dog to their unspeakable fate.

“Panicking isn’t going to help,” Shawn said. “At least not panicking about C.H.U.D. s. Because you’re not going to find any here. We’re not underground. And I’ve never heard of a cannibalistic humanoid closet dweller. If you want to panic about something useful, panic about the fact that the police are going to open this door at any minute.”

“I wasn’t panicking about C.H.U.D. s,” Gus said. “I wasn’t even thinking about them.”

“Then you’d better get your facial muscles under control, because they’re sending out some seriously bad messages,” Shawn said.

“Both of you, be silent,” Malko snapped from a corner of the closet.

“I’ve got to tell you: the police are going to think to look in here even if we don’t say anything,” Shawn said. “If your boss lets them down this hallway, it’s all over.”

Gus heard a noise from far above him, and he realized it was Kitteredge clearing his throat. “I’m sorry I got you two into this,” the professor said. “My own research has made me a target of the Cabal, and I’ve long accepted that prospect. But to drag in the two of you, when all you wanted to do was help-all I can say is I will do everything I can to take all the blame if we are captured.”

“We won’t be, if you’ll all be silent,” Malko said.

Gus heard a thunking noise from the back of the closet and suddenly felt the most wonderful sensation he’d ever experienced-a fresh breeze blowing in his face. The fact that it was only as fresh as the air from an unplugged refrigerator opened for the first time in a year didn’t concern him. It had oxygen in it, which put it far ahead of anything he’d been breathing since Low locked the closet door.

“This way,” Malko said.

Gus couldn’t imagine which way Malko was talking about, but since two of the four possible choices entailed passing through the solid flesh of either Shawn or Kitteredge and the third would mean unlocking the closet door just in time to meet the local constabulary, he chose to step toward the back wall.

Toward, but not to, as it turned out. The back wall had disappeared, and now the closet seemed to go on forever. Before he could figure out exactly what was going on, he was shoved forward by Shawn and Kitteredge.

Gus took a step, then two, keeping his arms outstretched in case the back wall had merely moved ahead a couple of feet.

“Everybody out?” Malko said, and received grunts of assent in return. “Good.”

Gus heard a door closing behind him, and then a string of lights glowed into existence overhead. Gus couldn’t believe what he was seeing in the faint illumination-a low, rounded tunnel carved through the bedrock of the hills. He couldn’t tell where it went or how long it would take to get there. It seemed to stretch on forever.

“Now get moving,” Malko commanded, and set off down the tunnel.

It wasn’t like there were many other options at this point. But if the rest of them had any doubts about the course of action, they were quickly convinced by the muffled sound of Low’s voice behind the door, apparently explaining to a policeman that the room they had just entered was indeed nothing more than a broom closet.

So they set off. How long they’d been walking and how far they’d gone Gus couldn’t say. At one point he contemplated counting the light fixtures they had passed under, figuring out how many feet there were between them and using that to calculate distance. But he kept losing count every time Kitteredge banged his head on a bulb, there didn’t seem to be any consistency in their spacing, and he realized he had no idea how many feet there were in a mile, so he gave that up and just kept moving.

Finally the tunnel walls fell away and disappeared into the darkness outside the radius of light pumped out by the bulbs.

“I think I understand now,” Kitteredge said. “This is a natural cave in the hills. Whoever built the tunnel started here and worked back toward the house. I’d guess this is an artifact of the Prohibition days.”

“Mr. Low’s father had it made,” Malko said.

Kitteredge peered back down the way they’d come. “Truly astonishing,” he said. “Even if it had been dug after 1956, when the first successful tunnel-boring machine was deployed in digging the Humber River Sewer Tunnel, a passage this long would have been an astonishing feat. But to think of the work that must have gone into construction without such a machine-it must have taken years.”

“Wasn’t around then to know,” Malko said.

“Do you know how long it is?” Kitteredge said.

“Unless it’s long enough to reach across the Mexican border, we’re still in trouble,” Shawn said.

“It’s not,” Malko said.

“So we are,” Gus said.

“But it’s got something just as good,” Malko said.

The hunchback took two steps forward and disappeared into the darkness. Before anyone could move, another set of lights switched on, and they could see where they’d arrived.

The cave was the kind of place Gus had dreamed of as a kid. It was so vast that even with the illumination of a hundred ceiling lights, its corners faded away into darkness. Stalagmites jutted up out of the ground around the walls-unless they were stalactites; Gus could never remember which was which-but the center of the cave had been cleared and the floor had been blasted and sanded until it was a solid slab of rock hundreds of feet across. It was, Gus thought, big enough to house a 747.

Which meant it was several times larger than it needed to be, since the only plane it housed was a Learjet.

Malko walked quickly to the plane. He turned a handle on the door, yanked it open, and pulled down a flight of steps. “Get in,” he growled.

Kitteredge wasted no time in racing up the stairs and into the plane. Shawn and Gus held back.

“Do you know how to fly one of these things?” Shawn said. “Because I’m pretty sure Gus doesn’t.”

“I don’t,” Gus said.

“Then you’d better hope I don’t have a heart attack when we’re at ten thousand feet,” Malko said. “Now get in.”

It had occurred to Gus to worry that their takeoff might be noticed by the police. If that happened, their brilliant escape would have been for nothing. He didn’t know what kind of technology was available for tracking planes these days, but he was pretty sure it was good enough to tell the cops where they were going before they got there.

If Shawn shared Gus’ concerns, he didn’t show it. Once he climbed into the jet’s cabin, his attention was completely focused on the luxurious surroundings. Four giant reclining chairs faced one another in the center of the cabin, solid mahogany tables jutted out of the walls in front of each seat, and a flat-screen television swung out of the bulkhead above each table. In the back there was a spacious galley, although there wasn’t anyone to cook in it.