The Schwarzschild Radius (43 page)

“Please…” Rachel fell to her knees crying. She had found what she was looking for. This was the killer she had danced for, whom she had deceived. But the deception was on her.

She begged him to release her and vowed she would never help the police find him. Her tormentor had been uncharacteristically silent since they had exited the car. Could there be people nearby who might help her?

She let out a scream that seemed to come from the throat of the tunnel itself. The sound echoed for several seconds. The man didn’t react. They were alone.

Rachel began to pray.
Engage him in conversation. Find a particle of reason in him.

“Let me go now―I still don’t know where I am. I’ll never help them find you.”

“I’ll tell you exactly where you are. You’re under the Major Deegan Expressway.”

“
No
!”

“This place has quite a history. In 1913, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company blasted a subway tunnel for thirteen blocks from Sedgewick Avenue to meet the city’s Jerome Avenue line. This was a busy area when there were baseball games at the Polo Grounds at One hundred and Fifty-Fifth Street. A little before your time. In 1958, the top of the el was cut off and the Major Deegan was built over it. The tunnels were abandoned, but you can still get to them through a portal. The portal we just walked through.”

They stood in what seemed like an antechamber, six feet by six. There was another metal door in front of them. He opened this door and led her through to a larger chamber, thirty feet by fourteen. He threw a switch and the light blinded her. Caches of supplies. Walls stacked with canned goods, military meals ready to eat, paper towels, medical kits, water purifiers, mess kits, and ammunition to last out a nuclear winter. This was a bunker. There was an enormous metal “X” bolted to the concrete wall with handcuffs at the end of each limb of the apparatus. There was a hangman’s noose screwed into the ceiling, and video lighting and sound equipment focused on a bed. Bloodstains spattered on the walls and floor. Now Rachel understood what was done here. He pulled aside a folding screen.

Sonia and Olivia were tied to a U-bolt in the concrete wall.

etective McKenna rode with Sergeant Nils Swenson and his SWAT team.

“The sheet on this guy is ugly,” said McKenna. “Hector Brazos. Assassin for the Mexican cartels―a Zeta. Trained by us no less, but the cartels paid better. The narco bigs wanted the victims tortured and videotaped, not just killed. Real Latin macho shit. They custom-ordered executions of entire families and this guy filled the order.”

“Nice.”

They had gotten a sheet on Brazos from Mexican authorities. McKenna had seen sadism in his time, but nothing that approached Brazos. Serial killers were nice guys compared to him. A U.N. Peacekeeper in Congo and Bosnia. You’ve got to be kidding. Accused of rape and killing of three Serbian girls. Never proved. Then he was hired as an independent contractor in Iraq. Uncle Sam was looking for a few good men.

In Mexico, he was put on trial for seventeen counts of mass murder. That is seventeen separate mass murders of families killed at the request of the cartel. Someone had shortchanged a Don, so the guy’s two little girls were kidnapped and massacred on tape, then the video was left in the mailbox of the father. The same for the wife, and finally his turn came. There were DVDs of home invasions with masked men raping wives and daughters in front of their fathers, forcing the father to have sex with the kid, then executing them one by one. Never convicted. No wonder the jurors acquitted.

The outer perimeter had already been set up by local police. They would contain the suspect and keep out traffic until the assault team arrived. A hospital had already been put on alert and listening devices had detected sounds from the target location. It started to rain and this would impact visibility.

“We have a sniper position yet?” asked McKenna.

“Two,” replied Swenson.

McKenna had no hope that the suspect would surrender, given that he’d already killed multiple people. At most, he would avoid the death penalty. That didn’t give the negotiator many bargaining chips.

The two teams closed in from the front and back. Rain came down hard now. One sniper laid across the roof of a parked garbage truck across the street. The other was on the closest flat roof about fifty yards diagonal from the target.

It was an ordinary looking house on Pennsylvania Street. A Cape Cod that no one would look at twice. Reminded him of Adolph Eichmann’s house from
The House on Garibaldi Street
. It disguised its resident well.

The signal was given.

They broke down the door and stormed the building. It was vacant. But not unguarded. McKenna looked up at one of the many security cameras and could sense Brazos looking straight at him.

he girls screamed in recognition.

“I’m sorry, Rachel. I’m so sorry,” said Sonia.

Olivia was barely recognizable. Her lips were swollen from beatings. She was naked with dried blood on her face and along the inside of her thighs.

In her peripheral vision, Rachel saw him glance back and forth, looking for a reaction that she wasn’t about to give him. Breaking bonds was at least as pleasurable to him as breaking bones.

Rachel felt her will slipping away as she was pushed and pulled into position against the wall. Brazos tied Rachel to the U-bolt.

He exited, leaving the door ajar.

Rachel kissed her sister.

“We’re going to die,” said Olivia.

“Don’t talk. Don’t talk,” said Rachel, looking around.

“This is a dungeon,” said Sonia.

“We’re underground?” whispered Rachel.

Sonia nodded.

Rachel was amazed that they were all alive. Why hadn’t he just killed them at once?

“Mom and Dad?” asked Olivia, softly. Rachel just nodded. She purged herself of sentiment, trying to think of a way out of here.

“What is this place?” she asked.

“A subway station. Abandoned,” said her sister.

There was a metal door ten feet away with a sliding bolt and padlock. At the far end of the chamber, another metal door had three sliding bolts and no lock.

There was a power generator with an exhaust tube going through the top of a door. Gas masks, a bio-hazard suit, bottled water, water purifiers, cans of food. Everything needed to survive, but there were no survivors in this place. The floor and walls were stained with blood. Death was prolonged here, not life.

The concrete was cool and now she felt a soft rumbling. A train. She had to find out what was behind those doors. It only made sense that there would be two points of access to this tunnel. Even rodents made sure of that. Joules would think of a way of escaping. He always found a solution. She had to find it too.

She leaned forward and pulled at the bonds with all her strength. It was no use. Footsteps.

Brazos returned and tested the light intensity where the scene would take place. Not good enough. He got another spotlight and fired it up. Better. He thought of all the possibilities with three girls. The cattle prod, the bedsprings, and the whip would play their roles. They could torment each other. At some point, a noose goes around the neck of one girl and another kicks the stool out from under her. But he would leave that privilege to the highest bidder. He liked that hanging idea. It usually took about five minutes to die that way, but it could be extended. The Nazis had a way of prolonging it for seventeen minutes or so, and they made exquisite films of their hangings.