Breakout (13 page)

“There’s no windows down here,” Marcantoni said. He closed the door they’d just come through, then hit the switch beside it.
Fluorescent ceiling fixtures lit up to show a deep but narrow room with the metal shelves on both sides and across the back.
“It’s down there,” Marcantoni said, and led the way to the rear, where the shelves were stacked with copier supplies.

Even with all the light on it, the door was hard to see, through the shelves stacked with boxes and rolls. It was painted
the same neutral gray as the wall and the metal shelving.

Marcantoni said, “These shelves aren’t fixed to the wall. I just pulled one end out, the other time.”

There was not much clearance between the rear and side shelving. Williams tugged on the shelving’s left end and its legs made
a shrieking noise on the floor, so he lifted the end instead. Mackey went over to help, and they wheeled the shelving out
till it faced up against the right-side shelves.

Angioni was studying the door, featureless metal with barely visible hinges on the right side. In its middle, at about waist
height, was a round hole less than an inch in diameter. Angioni said, “That’s the keyhole?”

“That’s it,” Marcantoni said. Walking over to the door, he took from his pockets a small socket wrench and a star-shaped bit.
As he fitted them together at right angles, he said, “The last time, I didn’t want to mess up this door so somebody might
notice something. I looked at the lock on the door at the other end, and I figured this one would be the same. It’s a double
bar that extends beyond the door to both sides, hinged in the middle so it’ll pivot to unlock it. This works.”

Bending to the door, he inserted the bit into the hole, with the wrench extended to the right. With both hands on the wrench,
he lifted. The wrench barely moved upward, and from beyond the door they could hear the scrape of metal on metal. “It’s goddam
stiff,” Marcantoni said, “but I got it last—Here it comes.”

Slowly he pulled the wrench upward until it was vertical above the hole. “That should do it.”

He pulled the bit out, separated the wrench into its two components, and put them away in his pocket, bringing out a short
flat-head screwdriver instead. Going down to one knee, he said, “Here’s where I pulled it out before. I figured nobody’d notice.”

Down close to the floor, where the bottom shelf would have covered it, the edge of the door and its wooden frame showed scratches.
Marcantoni forced the screwdriver in there, levered it, and all at once the door popped an inch inward. He got to his feet,
putting the screwdriver away. “There,” he said. “From now on, it’s easy.”

To show that, he put the fingers of both hands onto the protruding edge of the door and tugged. More metal-on-metal complaint,
and then the door grudgingly came open. The old hinges didn’t want to move, but Marcantoni insisted, and at last the door
was wide open, angled back away from the entrance.

Now they could look through into the tunnel, illuminated for the first several feet by the fluorescents in the storage room.
It was narrow, about the width of an automobile, with brick floor and brick walls up to an arched brick ceiling. Angioni shone
his flashlight, but it didn’t show much more than the fluorescents did. “It’s angled down,” he said.

“Yeah,” Marcantoni agreed, “it slopes down, not steep, then levels out, then slopes up again on the other side.”

“Well,” Angioni said, “shall we go?”

“That’s why we’re here,” Mackey pointed out.

Marcantoni said, “Let me get the tape off this flash.” He and Angioni peeled the electric tape from the flashlight lenses,
and then they started into the tunnel, moving in loose single file, carrying the wastebaskets and the file drawers.

Had the tunnel ever been used? If so, the people who’d been in here left no marks. At the time this had been built, gaslight
was common in this part of the world, but it hadn’t been installed in here. If someone had been in the tunnel, using some
kind of torch for light, there might be smoke smudges on the curved ceiling, but none appeared. It looked as though the tunnel
had been built simply because that was the way the plans had been laid out, then it was locked and forgotten.

They walked down the easy slope, the tunnel absolutely straight, then headed along the level section. There was no sound but
the brush of their feet. The air was cool and dry, with a faint mustiness. Every twenty feet or so there was a large iron
ring jutting from the right side wall at about shoulder level. For sconces? For a guide rope, to be followed in the dark?
There was no way to tell.

“There it is,” Marcantoni said, and they all came up to cluster at the beginning of the collapse. Just ahead of them, the
ceiling had started to fall, three bricks wide at the peak to begin with, then wider. On the floor were the bricks, some broken,
and a little debris. Farther on, the two flashlights showed that the collapse had become wider, with a combination of dirt
and stone fallen from the hole. By twenty feet from the beginning of the rupture, the debris made a steep mountain slope that
completely blocked the tunnel, top to bottom and side to side.

Marcantoni said, “My idea is, the bricks we can push against the side walls, and the rest of it we scoop into the wastebaskets,
carry it back a ways, dump it out, leave room to get by.”

Williams said, “What if more comes down, when we start moving this shit?”

“It’s an old fall,” Marcantoni said. “Whatever happened was a long time ago. It’s stable now.”

Parker said, “When we start to move it, it won’t be stable any more.”

“Well,” Marcantoni said, “this is the route. This is the only way in. And we’re here.”

They took turns with the flashlights, looking up at the early part of the rupture. The remaining bricks to both sides were
solid, hadn’t been loosened at all by whatever had happened to the part that fell. Here in its narrowest section, there was
shallow emptiness just above where the bricks had been, and then compacted earth. Farther on, more dirt and stone had fallen
from above the displaced bricks, so maybe Marcantoni’s idea was right, that this was an accident done by the crew removing
trolley tracks half a century ago, who never knew they’d done it.

Finally, Mackey said, “I think we can try it, anyway. If more of it starts to fall in, though, I’ve got to tell you, I’m going
back to the library, and anyone who wants my share can have it.”

“Listen, we can do it,” Angioni said. “Come on, Tom. A couple you guys go get tables.”

Williams and Mackey went away, pleased to go, taking one of the flashlights. Parker held the other, and the remaining three
moved slowly forward, at first kicking bricks and debris to the side, and then, when it got to be more than that, scooping
the file drawers into the slope of the debris mountain, dumping dirt and stones into the wastebaskets. They stacked bricks
to the sides, and carried heavy baskets back along the tunnel to empty into little pyramids of trash. From time to time, the
slope ahead of them made small shifts, and they could hear stones pattering down its side, but then it would be silent again.

By the time Mackey and Williams had made three round-trips, bringing one of the eight-foot-long tables back with them each
time, lining the tables up in a long row, the other four had progressed into the trash mountain, which was loose and easily
disassembled. Parker had spelled Kiloski, and then Kiloski had given the flashlight to Angioni, and now Marcantoni had it.

Above them, they were now at the serious part of the rupture, where the tear in the ceiling was a dozen bricks wide and where,
when the flashlight beam was aimed up there, it was all a dark emptiness, like a vertical cavern. But nothing else seemed
to want to come down out of there, so they kept working, and now Mackey and Williams joined them, and from that point on three
cleared debris while two carried the full wastebaskets back to empty, and one held both flashlights.

They worked for more than three hours, from time to time sliding the tables forward. They didn’t try to clear all the trash
out of the way, just enough so they could keep moving forward and bringing the tables along after them.

Finally, Marcantoni said, “Listen!”

They all listened, and heard the faint sound, the rustle of dirt sliding down a slope, and Angioni said, “Is that the other
side?”

“You know it is,” Marcantoni told him. “We’re almost through.”

Still it took another half hour to finish this part of it. When they moved the tables forward now, the easiest way was to
go on all fours underneath and juke them along that way. Soon they could start emptying the wastebaskets into the cleared
area ahead, which made things go faster.

And it looked as though Marcantoni’s estimate of the length of the collapse was right. The length of the three tables would
total just a little longer distance than the rupture above them. Nothing additional fell while they worked, but the tables
gave them a sense there’d still be a way out if things went bad.

Williams had the flashlights when they first broke through. “Hey, wait,” he said. “I can see it. Tom, there’s your damn door.”

They were looking through an ellipsis, less than a foot wide, brick and rupture above, rubble below, at a dark continuation
of the tunnel. At the far end, just picking up the gleam from the flashlights, was the black iron door.

At this end, the rupture in the ceiling had narrowed again, with less debris having fallen down. They moved more quickly,
wanting to get this part over with, and then Marcantoni strode on ahead, not bothering about a flashlight. When he reached
the door, he had his wrench-and-bit assembled, and with one move he had the door unlocked; one kick, and it was open.

A dry breeze whispered through the tunnel, maybe for the first time. A few pebbles rattled onto the tables.

On the far side, the iron door led to a nearly empty storage room, thick with dust. A few old glass display cases had been
shoved haphazardly against the side wall, along with an upright metal locker with a broken hinge, a jeweler’s suitcase with
a broken wheel, and other things that should have been thrown away. Whatever the army had used this space for, if anything,
Freedman Wholesale Jewel used it, when they remembered it at all, as a garbage dump.

Crossing this room to the door in the opposite wall, Marcantoni said, “I was only here during the rehab, so I don’t know the
layout now. I only know the plans didn’t have a lot of interior alarms, because they counted on the building to take care
of that.” He tried the knob and cursed. “What the hell’d they lock it for?”

Kolaski said, “That’s a rare antique suitcase.”

“Shit,” Marcantoni said. “Gimme a minute.”

It didn’t take much more, and then they moved on into a broad dimly lit area; the employees’ parking lot under the main store,
empty on a Sunday night. Exit lights and a few fire-code lights led them diagonally across the big concrete-floored room with
its white lines defining parking spaces to where an illuminated sign, white letters on green, read
STAIRS
.

The stairs were also concrete, with a landing at the top and a closed firedoor that was also locked. “Shit,” Marcantoni said,
and reached for his tools.

Parker said, “That door is going to be alarmed.”

Angioni said, “Why? I thought the whole idea was, these people don’t give a shit about security because they’ve got this whole
armory around them.”

Mackey said, “No, Parker’s right.”

“Damn it,” Marcantoni said, “this is the only way in. This, and the front door. Front door for customers, this door for employees
that park their cars downstairs. No other way in.”

Williams said, “This is also gonna be a firewall. Concrete block. So we don’t bypass the alarm by going through the wall.”

Marcantoni said, “We come this far. Now what?”

“We go in,” Parker said.

Marcantoni gave him a surprised look. “But you just said it’s alarmed.”

“It’ll be just this door,” Parker told him. “There isn’t any reason to link it with the entrance up at the front, so it isn’t
part of a whole system, there’s nothing else to hook up to it.”

Marcantoni nodded. “That sounds right.”

Parker said, “Since it’s just this one door, there’ll be a keypad on the inside, and we’ll have thirty seconds, maybe forty-five
seconds, to short-circuit it.”

Kolaski said, “I’m very good at that, that’s a specialty of mine.”

“It’s yours,” Marcantoni told him.

Parker said, “What it means is, he’s got to be able to get in there fast. Once you start playing with it, the countdown starts.”

Marcantoni gave the door lock a look of contempt. “This? A sneeze and it’s open.”

“Then go sneeze, Tom,” Kolaski said, taking out his own canvas pouch of tools, saying to Angioni, “Hold this open for me,
will you?”

Marcantoni looked around to see that everybody was in agreement and ready, then bent over the lock. He worked with concentration
and speed, then pushed the door open, stepped back, and said, “Go, Phil.”

Kolaski stepped through the doorway, followed by Angioni holding up the opened tool pouch. A small pale keypad was mounted
on the wall to the left of the door, near the lock. Four Phillips-head screws held it in place. Kolaski chose a tool, spun
the screws loose, chose a tool, popped the top of the keypad cover loose so that it flopped forward and down to hang from
its wires, chose tiny alligator clips, put them on the connectors at the back of the keypad, stepped back, said, “Done.”

Angioni laughed as Kolaski put his tool pouch away. “I love a showboat,” he said.

“It’s just talent,” Kolaski assured him.

They stepped through into a space that wasn’t entirely dark, since it was spotted with red exit signs, one over the door they’d
just come through. They were at a T intersection of hallways, one going left and right, the other straight ahead, exit signs
over the doors at the far ends. Closed or open doors were spaced along the halls.

Angioni said, “This doesn’t look like a jeweler.”