Matthew Dunn - Spycatcher

The footsteps were nearly directly in front of him now, and Will clenched his fist tighter, braced his body to move fast, and focused solely on the corridor ahead and the other corridor traversing it. The footsteps slowed. Will got ready.

A woman and a girl appeared at the end of the corridor. Will exhaled slowly and unclenched his fist. The woman had her arms around the girl and seemed to be consoling her. The girl was wearing a black dress and a white blouse and was crying. She carried a flute.

They stopped, and the woman told her, “It’s called stage fright. I used to get it when I was your age. Let’s find you a warm drink and see if you feel like going back out there afterward.”

They walked away from Will’s position, and soon they were gone. He stood upright and looked around. He decided that he was in the wrong place. He decided that the bomber would be hidden someplace where he could not be accidentally found by innocents. He moved on, and the noise of the concert grew louder as he went.

He tried to imagine the layout of a building like this and what it would need to support it and keep it running. He decided that the Metropolitan Opera House would need power generators and air-conditioning and heating units and thick pillars to support its stage and overall structure. He could see that most of those things were not on this floor. He knew that there had to be another floor beneath him and that it would be the perfect place for the bomber to wait while holding Lana captive.

He rubbed his face and desperately tried not to think about Lana, her condition now, and whether she was even still alive. He tried not to think of anything that would hinder his focus and concentration to stop the most terrible event.

Lights flashed to his right, and Will instinctively pushed himself against a wall. The lights were close and moved over floor and ceiling. He knew that they were flashlights, that in a place like this flashlights were unusual and would be carried only by officials who were looking for something. He decided that the officials had to be looking for him and were probably armed. He turned and ran away from them along the corridor he was in. He moved into an area of shadows and looked back down the corridor he’d just covered. He saw two men dressed in windbreakers, jeans, and hiking boots. They were carrying handguns. He couldn’t see their faces clearly, but they were dressed like the Secret Service men he’d spotted outside the opera house. They hadn’t seen him, but he knew that if he stayed where he was, he would be found.

He moved deeper into the shadows, turned into another corridor, jogged silently along it, past empty rooms and other corridors, and stopped. The lights were some distance behind him but had now separated. Will looked at the ceiling above him. Judging by the sounds coming from it, he knew he had to be directly under the stage. He ran along another corridor and estimated that he was close to one of the building’s exterior walls. He looked at every opening and every doorway near him, desperately searching for a route that would take him down to the opera house’s basement.

He ran to the end of the corridor and stopped. A door was before him that had a sign saying MAINTENANCE ONLY. He was about to move to the door when a beam of light struck the floor only a few feet in front of him. He silently moved backward and sidestepped into a corridor on his right. He stood motionless and watched the floor near him. He could still see the flashlight, and it was getting very close. The music above him grew, and Will cursed the noise as it obliterated any chance of his hearing the movement of the men on this floor. He breathed in deeply and tensed his muscles to lunge forward if the man closest to him turned into his corridor. The flashlight moved left and right over the floor and walls. It came closer. Will stayed still.

He saw the gun before he saw the man. It moved slowly across his vision and was almost within arm’s reach. The gun stopped for a moment and then moved forward. The man stepped into view and walked carefully along the corridor. Will pushed himself flush against a wall, even though he knew he would be seen if the man looked hard left in his direction. But the man kept walking and soon disappeared from view.

Will waited for thirty seconds before stepping carefully forward to the edge of the corridor containing the Secret Service man. He lowered himself down so that he was not at eye level and quickly poked his head out into the corridor before pulling it back. The Secret Service man was gone. Will slowly moved out and ran low toward the door for maintenance men.

He carefully shut the door behind him and saw stairs heading down. He took them, and with every step the sounds from the concert above him grew quieter. He reached the subbasement and now more than ever wished he were armed. He looked around him and knew that this was a perfect place to hide Lana. And he knew that it was also a perfect place for Megiddo’s bomber to wait and detonate his bombs ahead of schedule if anything happened.

The area around him had large, square metal vents jutting out of its roof and traveling at head height through space before reentering the roof at different points. Big generators were positioned nearby, humming in a low drone. He saw thick steel pillars that reached from floor to ceiling and assumed they supported the opera house’s stage and everything on it. He saw wall-mounted fixtures and occasional ceiling fixtures, but the light here was even dimmer than that on the floor above. He looked back up the staircase and wondered if the Secret Service men would soon open the door and search this basement. He looked around the vast area before him and wondered if there were other routes into this place. He decided that there had to be other entrances, that the Secret Service men could use any of those routes to find him here, and that they would know every inch of the place.

He checked his watch. It was now 8:20 P.M.

He walked forward, occasionally ducking his head to avoid the vents, and scoured the area to his left and right and ahead of him. But the place was a tangled mess of big machinery, narrow spaces, and dark recesses, and he could barely see beyond a few yards ahead of him. The hum of the generators was everywhere, and the concert could hardly be heard.

He walked faster and moved into an area that contained instrument panels, with switches and levers and warnings about voltage. He brushed a hand over one of the panels and saw that it was covered with fine dust and had therefore clearly not been touched for a few days. He moved on through an area containing dozens of thin pipes at floor level. He stepped over them into an area that was clear of anything at floor level, and as he did so, he heard a clunk of metal behind him. He spun around and saw that the metallic sound had come from one of the pipes. Whatever was coursing through it was causing it to vibrate and bang against an adjacent pipe. He turned to move forward.

Then he felt a hard object against the back of his head.

He stood frozen. He heard feet scuffing the floor. The object pressed harder against his head. He knew it had to be the muzzle of a gun and that the gun could belong to Megiddo’s bomber, but he also knew that it more likely belonged to one of the two Secret Service men who were searching for a man who had been desperate to enter the opera house. He wondered whether to spin around, grab the muzzle, simultaneously grab the hand holding the gun, and twist both so that he was in possession of the weapon. He could do the movement in under four-fifths of a second. But if the gun belonged to a Secret Service man, his colleague could be with him, and that man would shoot Will before he could complete the movement. He turned slowly.

Lana was before him. She was holding the gun.