The World Beneath (Joe Tesla) (6 page)

Chapter 6

November 28, 2:35 a.m.

Tunnels under Grand Central Terminal

Joe closed the heavy metal door behind him and moved through the dark tunnel. He donned his night-vision goggles, settling the strap behind the back of his head. The round contours of the tunnel jumped into sharper focus. He ran his fingers along the rough stone wall. In a few yards it would join with an active train tunnel, and he could already make out the lighter entrance where they met.

“Ready for another night out?” He looked down at Edison’s bright shape.

The dog didn’t seem to hear him. He stared off to his right, his head cocked to the side as if he were listening to a far-off sound. Joe stood still, straining his ears. He heard only the wind through the tunnels and the faraway rumble of a single train.

Whatever it was, it bothered Edison, so Joe might as well check it out. It might be the person whose boot prints he’d begun to see in the tunnels. Joe felt proprietary about the tunnels, as if they belonged to him, instead of just the house and the small tunnel that ran between the two doors.

“Find it!” he ordered Edison, and the yellow dog trotted forward. He didn’t put his nose to the ground, but instead held his head up and his ears pointed forward. Whatever he was tracking, he was tracking it by sound instead of scent.

After a few minutes’ walk, Joe heard it, too. A thud echoed down the tunnel. It wasn’t a train—too slow. It was rhythmic, like the beat of a sad song. He’d never heard a sound quite like it, and he wanted to know what it was. It might be dangerous, but he had to know.

He trotted forward for about a quarter mile until the tunnel ended at a vast well-lit chamber where the tracks came in from outside and merged toward Grand Central Terminal. He and Edison often played fetch here.

The thuds changed to a clanking sound. It drew him to the left, to an unlit siding. A quick glance at the ground told him that this was the person who had been leaving the footprints. Feeling like one of the children who followed the Pied Piper to their death, Joe turned sideways and slipped between black-painted columns.

He had to know, and he had to share knowledge. This trait had cost him dearly at Pellucid when the CIA began to insist that only they should get the high-powered version of the facial-recognition software, while the rest of the world got a dumbed-down version. The demand, a veiled threat really, had resulted in bitter discussions between Joe and the other chief executives at Pellucid. They were all for giving the CIA what they wanted and not risking the IPO. That way everyone could make money and be happy. Even dumbed down, the software was still the best on the market. But Joe had insisted that the software was too powerful to leave in the hands of a single agency—if they were going to release it, everyone should have a right to use it.

His insistence on making the knowledge free to everyone had alienated everyone except for Sunil, but Joe had the majority shares, so they had to go along with him. In the subsequent legal battle, Pellucid had prevailed, at least for now. The upshot was that Joe had lost his closest friends. Still, he’d been right.

He hefted his heavy metal flashlight in one hand. A weapon in a pinch.

He crept forward, trying to make as little noise as possible, keeping to the wooden ties. A yellow glow led him on. A minute later the source of the sound was illuminated by a battery-powered lantern set on the rocky ground—a scarecrow of a man pounding a brick wall with a sledgehammer. With each stroke, he mumbled a word. Gradually, Joe realized that he was counting. A man after his own heart.

The man’s ragged pants and filthy jacket resembled desert-style camouflage, although it was hard to say through the thick coating of dirt and soot. The man struck the wall again, back straight, form perfect. His posture said that he was military.

Whoever he was, he was taller than Joe, and looked stronger, too.

Joe debated leaving him alone. The man was only damaging an old wall, and the wall wasn’t Joe’s business. No point in messing with a man with a hammer. But Joe had to know why.

Before he could decide what to do, the man wheeled around, hammer held high. Edison growled a warning.

“It’s just me,” Joe said, as if the hammerer knew him.

The man’s glassy blue eyes came into focus. His eyes were set farther apart than average, one a few millimeters higher than the other, and his face gleamed with sweat. “They call me Rebar. Or Subject 523.”

The numbers flashed in Joe’s head: brown, blue, red.

“Joe,” he offered, trying not to let on that he was frightened. “Nice to meet you.”

Rebar lowered the hammer, and Joe relaxed. The man stood well over six feet. Joe bet he could do serious damage if provoked. Even without the hammer.

Rebar put the hammer head on the ground and leaned the handle against his baggy pants. His clothes hung on him as if he were a coat hanger instead of a man, as if he’d lost a lot of weight over a short time. His pockets bulged with dirty papers.

“Interesting wall you got there, soldier,” Joe said, inanely. How did you strike up a conversation with a crazy man in the middle of a dark tunnel in the middle of the night? You didn’t. You ran. But the unsolved problem kept him there.

Hefting the hammer, Rebar half-turned back to the wall. Joe followed his gaze. Soot had settled on the mortar between the broken bricks, and black lines streaked down the side. That wall had been put up a long time ago, probably before Rebar was born. Why was he knocking it down?

“What are you after?” Joe drew himself to his full height, deliberately echoing Rebar’s military posture.

“Completing my mission, sir.” Rebar rasped his hand across dirty brown stubble on his receding chin. “The month is almost up.”

“Mission?” Joe stood straight, legs apart, hands loose by his sides, ready to run if he had to. Edison kept his distance from the man, too.

Rebar gestured with the hammer’s wooden handle. “Been looking for what’s back there for a long time.”

“Mind if I stick around to see?”

“No, sir. I do not mind,” Rebar said, but the scowl on his face indicated otherwise.

Joe leaned against the cold steel pillar and waited. Rebar picked up the hammer again and smacked it into the bricks, the noise echoing down the tunnel. Brick chips caromed off the wall, one slicing a thin line into Rebar’s stubbled cheek. He didn’t seem to notice.

Brick dust, soot, and crushed cement swirled around the hammering man. He looked like a genie emerging from the glowing lantern in a cloud of red and gray dust. Rebar coughed, spit next to the rusty tracks, and went back to hammering, counting each blow.

Should Joe offer to take a turn? What was the etiquette on performing public acts of vandalism with an accomplice? Lookout or criminal, those were the roles. That made him the lookout. He should sneak off. But he stayed.

A section of wall at Rebar’s shoulder height gave, toppling forward to create a dark hole. Joe blinked in surprise. He pushed off the pillar and stood straight.

Joe fidgeted from side to side while Rebar pounded the broken section until it was big enough to climb through. Joe wanted him to stop so that he could peek at the secret behind the wall, but he kept his peace. After all, the mission was Rebar’s, not his.

Rebar picked up the lantern and held it above his head like an old-time lighthouse keeper, warning ships away from the rocks. The man’s grotesque shadow leaped across the pillar and fell on Joe’s hand.

Without turning around, the man thrust the lantern through the hole. The tunnel around Joe went dark. The silhouette of Rebar’s head against the yellow light blocked Joe’s view inside.

Joe moved next to him, leaning forward eagerly. He couldn’t wait to see it.

“Permission to see inside?” he asked.

The horse-like smell of Rebar’s sweat blanketed the air, reminding him how much bigger, stronger, and crazier Rebar was than he. Rebar leaned away with a grunt, leaving the arm holding the lantern in the bricked-up room.

Joe peered through the hole. In the center of the room stood a single blue train car. Rust bloomed along its steel side like dark lichen. The window glass looked more than twice as thick as normal train windows, watery green behind a patina of dust. Bulletproof. A familiar circular seal adorned the car’s side—an eagle bearing a laurel branch in one clawed foot and arrows in the other. He didn’t need to read the words above it to know what they said: Seal of the President of the United States.

A legend in the tunnels. He had heard of a special train car that had carried Franklin Delano Roosevelt to New York during the Second World War, stopping two hundred feet underneath the Waldorf Astoria, a short walk from a freight elevator used to carry FDR and his automobile up to the hotel parking lot during the war. After the war, the car had vanished.

Until now.

Rebar had found it. But why?

A flash of ivory drew Joe’s eye to the top of the car. Thick dust blanketed old bones. A tiny skull, long arm bones, fragile-looking ribs. A child’s skeleton.

A train passed a hundred feet behind them. The ground shook. A piece of broken brick clattered into the room, and the skeleton on top of the car shivered. Rebar’s arm twitched. Moving light scattered shadows around the room as if a thousand ghosts danced there, finally set free.

Joe shifted his gaze from the dancing shadows to the left wall. Olive-green fabric covered with dust leaned against the stone. On the train ties next to the green pile rested a pale orb with a hole in the back.

A skull.

The green rags? An Army uniform covering a skeleton. At the end of one green arm a dusty gun lay atop the rusty train track. The man had shot himself in the head.

On the ground between the skull and the uniform-clad skeleton lay a set of round wire-framed eyeglasses, one lens a spider’s web of cracks. A man died there, long ago. Not just one (cyan). Two (blue). Close to the wall, a second skeleton wore a long coat that looked as if it had once been white.

He realized it from their postures—the men had been walled in alive.

As much as he was repulsed by their terrible deaths, the mystery intrigued him. Who had walled them in here? And why had Rebar searched for them and brought them to light?

Rebar’s arm trembled. Shadows formed and broke. Joe withdrew his head.

“I found it,” Rebar whispered. “It will save me, the treasure in there.”

“Treasure?”

Rebar lowered the lantern to the dirt. He fingered the greasy handle of his hammer. “It’s mine, sir.”

Joe’s heart raced. They were alone down here. No one to stop Rebar from doing whatever he wanted. Possibilities clicked through his head, but it came down to fight-or-flight. Rebar was bigger than he was, armed with a hammer, and insane.

He took a careful backward step. “I understand that. It’s yours.”

Rebar cocked his head as if listening.

The tunnel was silent. Joe backed up, eyes on the hammer. He came up hard against the pillar.

“We need to tell them, sir,” Rebar said. “Before the end of the month.”

“Tell them what?” Joe asked. His heart thudded against his ribs. He wasn’t an action hero, he was a nerd. He couldn’t disarm a man with a hammer. Next to him, Edison growled.

“You don’t know?” Rebar asked. “What’s your name? What are you doing here?”

Rebar’s muscles corded in his neck. He lifted the hammer and advanced on Joe.

Joe ran. He focused on the tracks in front of him, the tracks that had carried FDR’s train here all those years ago. If the silver rails tripped him up, he was dead. Rebar was crazy, and he’d use that hammer if he could.

Think, he told himself. Find a safe place. He headed back for the open room. Trains pulled in and out of there, sometimes, at this time of night. A driver might see him, help him.

He wasn’t a brave man. Cowardice was to be ashamed of, he knew. He’d always tried to think his way out of fights, and run if he had to. Standing and fighting was never his favorite option. And Rebar had a hammer.

Joe veered off into an unlit tunnel. He had to make sure that he wasn’t being followed. Edison loped silently next to him, calm as always.

No sound of running footsteps on the tracks. Not even the grumble of a train.

Farther down the tunnel, he and the dog slowed. Joe kept glancing over his shoulder to see if Rebar followed them. No one did.

He took a shuddering breath before continuing. This tunnel connected with another not too far ahead, and he could follow that one back to the door that opened onto his own tunnel and his house. He’d be safe there.

What had Rebar uncovered? How had he known to look there? Joe might not be a brave man, but he was a persistent one. Once something piqued his interest, he wouldn’t give up on it.

He would return to the brick room later to pry out the secrets that Rebar had kept from him. He would go back. He wouldn’t be driven away from the truth.

He entered the code and unlocked the metal door. Gesturing for Edison to go first, he hurried inside and closed the door. The green light told him that the system had armed itself again. He leaned against the inside to catch his breath and wait for his heart to slow. This was real fear, not the product of misfiring brain chemistry.