Ridley Pearson - The Art of Deception

Vanderhorst abandoned the teller window and walked incredibly calmly, Boldt noted, toward the EMPLOYEES ONLY door that led into the back hallway. But Vanderhorst stopped at that door, studying Mackenzie, who had his back turned.

Boldt spoke loudly into the crowded security room, “Open the door, Vanderhorst.” On the screen, Vanderhorst continued to look like he was weighing his options. “Through that door! Now!”

Vanderhorst disobeyed, taking several steps toward Mackenzie and the bank’s main entrance.

“We’re losing him!” Boldt shouted into his handheld.

Denny Schaefer calmly instructed Mackenzie, “Phase two, Big Mac.”

On the screen, Mackenzie spun on his heels, looked in the direction of Vanderhorst, and reached inside his sport jacket, revealing his holster and weapon.

Crack the whip. Vanderhorst turned, shoved a key into the side door, and hurried through.

“Okay!” an elated Boldt shouted much too loudly for the small room, “let’s do it like we talked about.”

The guards busied themselves throwing switches, and the monitors displayed new views: the back hall, the ATM room, the stairs to the basement, and several angles of the basement itself.

“Go … go … go!” Boldt shouted at the screen like an arm-chair quarterback. Into the radio’s microphone he shouted, “More pressure, more pressure!” as Vanderhorst paused in the hallway outside the door that led into the ATM room. Boldt didn’t want that door an option.

Dispatch barked another order, and although the monitors had no sound, Boldt knew that Mackenzie was now pounding on that hallway door. Vanderhorst reacted in a mechanical, nervous way, looking first in that direction and then taking off down the hall and into the stairs leading to the basement.

“Yes! ” Boldt shouted excitedly. He grabbed Gaynes by the arm. “Get ready to run. You first. The basement.”

“Copy,” she said, moving toward the security room’s door.

Behind them, the image of Vanderhorst moved one monitor to the next, as if he were jumping from screen to screen. As he reached the last, with the flip of a switch, the monitors displayed several different views of the basement.

Special Ops had added these cameras at Boldt’s request.

Gaynes understood Boldt’s plan then for the first time.

“You’re stinging him into showing us the way into the Underground,” she said.

“We hope,” he answered.

With that, as if instructed, Vanderhorst moved quickly across three of the screens and used a master switch to lower the elevator.

Boldt mumbled, “Not possible. I checked that elevator myself and-” But he interrupted himself as Vanderhorst boarded the elevator, stepped inside, and-after a brief but unexpected monitor glitch that left Vanderhorst off-camera momentarily-keyed open a back panel on the elevator car intended for emergency evacuation.

“Oh, shit,” Boldt barked, a police lieutenant who took pride in rarely swearing. Vanderhorst stepped through and pulled the elevator’s panel closed behind him.

“Keys!” Boldt shouted at the security men, as if rehearsed, which it was not.

One of the guards tossed him an enormous ring of keys, saying, “The small, silver one does the panel. The green dot does the elevator override.”

Susan Hebringer had been pulled through that panel. Patricia Randolf before her. Boldt could see it play out, as if watching one of the monitors.

Boldt and Gaynes took off at run, Boldt shouting instructions into a handheld that he knew would lose contact once he was underground. “Contact lost. Repeat, Wildhorse contact lost!”

Dispatch copied. Boldt shouted, “We want him alive, people!

For God’s sake, let’s take him alive.”

Boldt and Gaynes descended the stairs two at a time, reaching the basement only seconds after they’d left the security room.

At the most, Vanderhorst had a half minute lead on them.

Boldt keyed the elevator open, then tossed the keys to Gaynes, who was first into the car. She keyed open the back panel as Boldt stepped through. “Sixty seconds,” Boldt said, checking his watch.

They climbed through the open hole, descending a ladder of rebar that protruded from the chamber’s concrete wall. The space between the shaft’s wall and the car was narrow. Gaynes descended effortlessly, while Boldt had to flatten himself, his jacket hanging up on the car’s mechanics. The thick air smelled heavily of grease and electricity. Gaynes switched on a Maglite well before she reached the bottom rung, making the short leap to the shaft’s dirt floor. Boldt followed immediately behind her.

“Lieu!” The Maglite’s beam revealed the inside of a cast-iron coal chute door about two feet square. A false wall of bricks had been stacked to create an illusion, from the Underground side, of an enclosed coal chute. Gaynes kicked down the dry stack, pushed the iron door open further, and squeezed through.

Boldt followed, again straining to get his girth through the small space.

Boldt heard a crackle in his earpiece, and the broken voice of Denny Schaefer as a few radio waves managed to briefly penetrate the depths. He couldn’t understand a word that was said: They were on their own.

They stood in one of the dark underground hallways, vaguely familiar from the previous foray into the underground city block.

Boldt used sign language to direct Gaynes, indicating that they would split up. She would take this hallway, Boldt would move south and search for another. Gaynes acknowledged. Boldt’s fists came together: They could reunite at the far end of the underground space.

Boldt got his flashlight lit. Ninety seconds had elapsed since they’d lost Vanderhorst.

They heard a crash in the distance-wood and then glass.

Too far away to discern someone running.

Boldt took off into the dark, through a huge, empty room.

He found a second hallway and turned left, his mind searching for explanations for that noise. Certainly Vanderhorst, if their man, would know this city block of the Underground intimately, an area the size of several football fields. So what, or who, had made that noise-and was it worth following? Boldt slopped through mud and debris, believing that by then Gaynes would be passing close to the lair. She would take a few seconds to inspect it. In that time, Boldt found himself at the end of the hall.

He took the door to the right, into and through a former barbershop, the beam of light catching his own reflection in the dusty mirrors, still intact. He jumped back from his own reflected image, stumbled over a barber chair, and fell down, the chair noisily spinning on rusted joints. Boldt clambered to his feet, dodged debris on his way out yet another door, and found himself in a section of Underground sidewalk he hadn’t seen on his earlier exploration. The sidewalk was caved in ahead, choked with earth and stone, reminding him how fragile an environment this was. He took the first doorway to his left that he encountered, working his way judiciously through a room filled with discarded washing machines and tooling equipment that had to go back forty years.

Through this door he reached another short hallway, and up ahead a tangle of yellow police tape. He paused here, aware this had been what he’d heard only moments before-Vanderhorst had been tripped up by one of their yellow tapes. Blood beat loudly in his ears, his mouth dry, his body damp with sweat. He thought of his promises to Liz to stay behind the desk, of his kids and their bright faces. But then in his mind’s eye he saw Susan Hebringer’s unconscious body being dragged down this hallway, a face now attached to the man dragging her, and he inched forward, following the unmistakable sound, an uneven scraping-something dragging-through a door to his right.