Дэвид Балдаччи - Walk the Wire

He was in a room with no windows and no door. This puzzled Robie, but only for an instant. He angled his gaze upward and saw the ladder leading to what looked to be a trapdoor in the ceiling. He lifted his arms, until he felt the resistance. The same with his legs. He looked down, and in the dim light provided by the sole overhead bulb, he observed the chains around his limbs that were attached to a thick iron ring set in the floor. They had shackled his hands in front of him, which was the only positive development that Robie could see.

He shifted his weight to the right and saw the hulking figure of Amos Decker lying a foot from him. Decker, too, was shackled, and his chains were also inserted into the same floor ring.

Decker was also awake and staring at him. “Not good,” he said softly.

Robie gave one curt nod in agreement. They had taken both his pistols. He could feel their absence. He was sure they had taken Decker’s gun as well. “They got the jump on us.”

“Any idea where we might be?” asked Decker.

Robie once more looked around. “Underground. Air is musty with an overlay of petroleum products. No windows, ceiling trap door. I’d say maybe an old underground storage facility for an abandoned oil well.”

Decker nodded and looked around. He managed to sit up and planted his back against the wall. Robie did the same. The pair were shoulder to shoulder looking down at the thick chains that stood in the way of their freedom.

“Feel like I got hit by a truck,” said Decker. “But I can’t remember anything of what happened. And that’s saying something for me.”

“They probably deployed the same concoction I used on the woman at the Air Force facility. Incapacitation agent blended with an amnesiac component. We remember nothing that might have happened, who we might have seen, or how they got us here, although that wouldn’t be much, because the spray works pretty much instantly.”

“So do you have a plan to get us out of here?”

“Working on it.” Robie tested the chains once again. Solid, no cracks, not an imperfection or weak spot he could see. The floor ring was about two inches in width. An elephant wouldn’t have been able to defeat it. The steel plate it was a part of was securely bolted to the floor. He eyed the door in the ceiling. “That’s our only way out. I wonder if they wired it, just in case?”

“Well, I don’t see us getting that far, so what does it matter?”

Robie didn’t answer him. He reached down, lifted his sweatshirt, and unbuckled his belt.

“Don’t tell me you have some sort of acid in there to melt our chains,” said Decker, eyeing him incredulously. “I think I saw that on TV.”

Robie had removed a Velcro backing from the inside of his belt and plucked out two slender pieces of metal that had been hidden there. “Just lock picks. And this isn’t a TV show.”

He went to work on his shackles and soon had himself and Decker free.

Robie next eyed the ladder and the door in the ceiling. “Just stay here while I check it out.” He gripped the ladder and began to climb. As Robie neared the door he ran his gaze over the frame, looking for stray wires, a power pack, or anything else that would give away some sort of booby trap. Seeing none, he gingerly pushed against the wood. It didn’t budge.

“Locked,” he said. “No surprise there.”

He came back down and looked around the room. In an old bucket were four long iron spikes. He slipped them through his belt, took off his boot, and uncovered a cavity in the heel.

Decker saw a small blob of what looked like Play-Doh. “C-Four?”

“Semtex, but it does the same thing,” replied Robie as he removed something else from the cavity and worked away combining the two elements. When that was done, he clambered back up the ladder, pressed the Semtex against the door, uncovered two wires he had pressed into the blob and twined their ends around one another. He quickly retreated and grabbed Decker, and they backed away as far as possible from the door.

Ten seconds later the explosive detonated, blowing the ceiling door out of the way. Their escape path was now exposed.

But Robie didn’t rush forward. He kept a hand on Decker’s shoulder. Decker could see the intensity on the other man’s face as he waited, listening and watching.

“Okay, let’s move.”

Robie scrambled up the ladder first, with Decker following more slowly. Robie eased his head above the rim of the doorway and looked around. He jumped clear of the opening and helped Decker through. They were in what looked like a long passageway made of dirt and rock with steel beams overhead and posts set in the dirt at regular intervals. Fluorescent lights overhead provided feeble illumination.

“Which way?” said Decker.

Robie looked in both directions, took a sniff of the air, examined the dirt on either side of the doorway, and said, “Footprints and airflow only come from that way,” he said, pointing to their right.

He took the spikes out of his belt and held two in each hand. They poked out between his fingers like an animal’s claws.

“If anyone’s here, that explosion will have alerted them,” said Decker.

“I’m actually counting on that,” said Robie.

A hundred feet later, Robie grabbed Decker and thrust him into the shadows right next to the wall. Robie reached up and pulled the wires from the light directly above them. This part of the passageway became far darker.

Someone was coming fast.

A few moments later a trio of men burst into view; all three were armed. They ran in a column formation.

Right as they passed, Robie struck with the spikes. He stabbed one man in the neck, spun around, and sunk two spikes into the second man’s gut, thrusting the spikes upward to his diaphragm. Both men went down, and neither would get back up.

The other man turned and pointed his sub gun at Robie. He never fired, because Decker fell on top of him. His nearly three hundred pounds pinned the man flat to the ground, and his sub gun tumbled from his hands.

Robie picked up the weapon and looked at the other two men. One was dead, the other was gurgling his last few breaths. Robie waited until he expired and said to Decker, “Let him up.”

Decker slowly rose off the man. Robie said, “Who are you?”

The man sat on his haunches and shook his head. He was around forty and his dark, curly hair was shot through with gray.

“Where are we?” said Robie.

Another shake of the head.

“Why did you kidnap us?”

This time the man didn’t even bother to shake his head. He just sat there and stared at Robie for a moment before lifting his hand to his mouth.

Robie leapt forward but the man had already swallowed something.

He started convulsing, then foam seeped out of his mouth, and he fell sideways. He took a few tortured breaths and then his body relaxed.

Decker bent over him and checked his pulse. There was none.

“That was a fast poison,” he said.

“Sort of the point,” replied Robie.

Decker picked up one of the sub guns, and they kept going in the same direction.

There was a doorway up ahead.

Robie fingered the sub gun and looked at Decker.

“Count of three. You go left, I go right.”

Decker nodded.

“One... two... three.”

They burst into the room, Robie’s gun covering the right half of the space and Decker’s the left.

Dead center of the room stood Ben Purdy.

He wasn’t alone.

He was holding a gun to the other person’s head.

And that person was Alex Jamison.

“You guys are really something,” said Purdy, shaking his head. “I seem to have run out of men to take you on.”