Will Staeger - Public Enemy

“All right, Miss Laramie,” Ebbers said, “I am hearing you, and we are not thinking differently from each other.” She heard the measured tone in his delivery, even with the electronic garble. “But we do, however, have a moment. We’re not sure of the progress of your operative yet, if any, and we’re also not yet positive any of the other sleepers are being activated. If more than just the Scarsdale sleeper stops by his local Home Depot this morning, then I agree. There won’t be any alternative. It’ll be time for FEMA, CDC, DHS, FBI, CIA, the media, everybody and their grandmother to board up the windows and hunker down for the storm.”

Laramie felt the heat easing back down her neck.

But I’m certainly not prepared to undertake the risk of waiting another day, or two, or more, when the quarantining efforts and the tried-and-true Soviet strategy of impelling your citizens to spy on their neighbors could very well prevent thousands of casualties from turning into hundreds of thousands, or more-

“In the meantime,” Ebbers said, “pick up your Scarsdale sleeper, and get up there and interrogate him. See if you can deploy the same charm you did with Janine Achar while you’re at it.”

It suddenly occurred to Laramie she’d been idiotic not to already have done what Ebbers was telling her to do. Because Achar set off his explosives before anyone was able to speak to him, Laramie had only been able to interview his widow-and now they had the chance to interrogate one of Achar’s comrades while the man remained alive and kicking.

“Not sure why I didn’t already-”

“The moment one more of them stops by his local nursery or hardware store, we go in and take all of them,” Ebbers said. “At which point I’ll pull the fire alarm-the leaders of the disbanded task force will be provided the new intel discovered by the ‘special investigator’ and will immediately, I suspect, activate all the measures you mentioned.”

“Right,” Laramie said. “The fire alarm.”

A moment of static clicked by.

Then Ebbers’s electronically distorted voice said, “All right, then,” and the red indicator light on the spiderphone flickered out and the line went dead.

Cooper identified what he assumed were most but not all of the video cameras monitoring his side of the mansion. There was also a roving patrol, two guys walking together around the outside of the house, plus a few Secret Service equivalents camped out near a pair of black Chevy Suburbans toward the front of the residence.

There were some weak points in the house’s design, mostly the sort related to the historical qualities of the home, including the lead casement windows they’d kept in order to maintain the authentic hacienda look. Still, having seen photographs of Márquez’s wine cellar-and working from the dread of his sixth sense on the certainty that a sequence of tunnels and rooms originally designed as a prison and torture chamber ran beneath his feet-Cooper decided now, as he had when he’d examined the images provided by Laramie’s guide, that the surest way in would be underground.

There were no electrical wires, television cables, or other utility connections visible on the exterior of the home. He looked for and found the mansion’s air-conditioner units, which they’d planted in a bed of bark chips alongside some tropical greenery. As he suspected, in a kind of garden of technology, it was in this bed of A/C units that the various utility meters were planted too. Another, larger utility box of some kind stood among the other measuring devices; initially at a loss, he was finally able to identify it as the head end of a cable connection, probably capable of distributing television service across a small city. He learned this by cracking open the lock and peering inside the panel door, where he found labels, printed in Spanish, for the various feeds and splits to forty-three televisions.

Salvadorans’ tax dollars, he thought, hard at work.

His theory hit paydirt upon his discovery of a rectangular equivalent of a manhole cover. It was nestled in the bark behind the various meter stands and boxes. With the aid of the knife he’d brought for any hand-to-hand encounters with the security staff, he got the heavy metal lid pried from its roost, exposing beneath a broad band of wires and pipes, held together by an oversize plastic strip of the sort used to secure extension cords and hoses.

The batch of utility connections stretched toward the house in its semi-organized, snaking fashion-running along the side of what looked more or less like a mining tunnel.

Cooper recognized the tunnel for what it was, those old ghosts whispering to him from its walls-there wouldn’t be any stains left, not anymore, but he figured it was a good bet that a great deal of blood had been spilled on the floors of these tunnels. If he went long enough without blinking, Cooper knew he’d start seeing the blooms of red, even if he was only imagining it.

He whipped out his Maglite and examined the edge of the access opening for sensors or any other sort of alarm. There was nothing on the rim of the opening itself, but he caught a glimpse of what looked like a motion detector built into the base of the tunnel near where he’d need to jump inside it.

He was deciding whether he ought to just plow a bullet into the motion detector when a bleating, two-tone alarm suddenly tore through the atmosphere, the pealing scream coming at him from all angles, so loud it seemed to be part of the air itself.

Lights as bright as those illuminating the emerald lawn chunked to life along the exterior of the house, bathing Cooper in sudden bright white. A second, piercingly high-pitched alarm began sounding out over the two-tone blare, all of it so loud it nearly peeled the surface from Cooper’s eardrums.

He didn’t think he’d set it off with his examination of the utility panel, but it didn’t matter-there wasn’t much choice on what to do now. He fired a pair of shells into the motion sensor at the base of the tunnel, grabbed the access panel, leaped into the hole, and pulled the heavy panel tight against its stops above as he dropped inside.

No doubt, he thought, the darkness of the subterranean tunnel overtaking him, they found one of the dead guards-good fucking plan you put together here.

He clicked on the flashlight and was greeted rudely by the illuminated image of an ancient door about five feet in front of him. The serpentine batch of utility cords disappeared through the doorway by way of a small, square brick of wood that had been cut from the door. The door was made of old wood and iron. It had a round, draping handle that looked like a knocker, along with a modern chain-and-padlock deal holding the door closed. The chain looped snugly around a pole built into the wall.

“Probably gonna hurt,” he said, brought his MP5 around, took aim at the older, rusted hinges on the side of the door opposite the padlock, and held the trigger down for ten or fifteen rounds’ worth of automatic weapons fire. He tried to do it in circles around the two hinges, but the muzzle flash blinded him and a couple of ricocheting shells nipped one shoulder and a thigh, so before he completed his intended lines of fire he was ducking, dropping the gun, and covering his head with his arms. When the sound of ricocheting bullets stopped echoing through his skull, he surveyed the door with his flashlight, flipped the rifle strap around to push the weapon to his back, lowered his head, and plowed his full bulk into the door.

The old door broke off its hinges with little resistance and Cooper went flying into the void beyond. Too late, he reconsidered what he’d just done and got quickly to replacing the door, standing it up to approximate its position before he’d mauled the thing. They’ll know I came in here now-at least as long as they’re good enough to open the panel and clock the busted-up door.