Chapter 46

The staircase led up to the first floor and came out in back of what had once been the place where the fire trucks parked. There was a wide empty floor full of rat shit and the kind of mysterious random trash that accumulates in abandoned buildings. The big vehicle doors were locked shut with rusted iron bars and old padlocks. But there was a personnel door in the left-hand wall. Getting to it wasn’t easy. There was a half-cleared path. The trash on the floor had been mostly kicked to the side by the passage of feet, but there was still enough debris left around to make barefoot walking difficult. I ended up sweeping stuff out of the way with the side of my foot and stepping into the spaces I had made, one pace at a time. Slow progress. But I got there in the end.

The personnel door was fitted with a new lock, but it was designed to keep people out, not in. On the inside was just a simple lever. On the outside was a combination dial. I found a heavy brass hose coupler on the floor and used it to wedge the door open a crack. I left it that way for my return and stepped out to an alley and two careful paces later I was on the West 3rd Street sidewalk.

I headed straight for Sixth Avenue. Nobody looked at my feet. It was a hot night and there was plenty more attractive skin on display. I looked at some of it myself. Then I flagged down a cab and it took me twenty blocks north and half a block east to the Home Depot on 23rd Street. Docherty had mentioned the address. Hammers had been bought there, prior to the attack under the FDR Drive. The store was getting ready to close up, but they let me in anyway. I found a five-foot pry bar in the contractor section. Cold rolled steel, thick and strong. The trip back to the registers took me through the gardening section and I decided to kill two birds with one stone by picking up a pair of rubber gardening clogs. They were ugly, but better than literally nothing. I paid with my ATM card, which I knew would leave a computer trail, but there was no reason to conceal the fact that I was out buying tools. That purchase was about to become obvious in other ways.

Cabs cruised the street outside like vultures, looking for people with stuff too awkward to carry. Which made no sense economically. Save five bucks at the big-box store, spend eight hauling it home. But the arrangement suited me fine right then. Within a minute I was on my way back south. I got out on 3rd near but not right next to the firehouse.

Ten feet ahead of me I saw the medical tech step into the alley.

The guy looked clean and rested. He was wearing chinos and a white T-shirt and basketball shoes. Staff rotation, I figured. The agents held the fort all day, and then the medical guy took over at night. To make sure the prisoners were still alive in the morning. Efficient, rather than humane. I imagined that the flow of information was considered more important than any individual’s rights or welfare.

I put the pry bar in my left hand and hustled hard in my loose rubber shoes and made it to the personnel door before the guy was all the way through it. I didn’t want him to kick the hose coupler away and let it close behind him. That would give me a problem I didn’t need. The guy heard me and turned in the doorway and his hands came up defensively and I shoved him hard and tumbled him inside. He slid on the trash and went down on one knee. I picked him up by the neck and held him at arm’s length and eased the brass coupler aside with my toe and let the door close until it clicked. Then I turned back and was about to explain the guy’s options to him but I saw that he already understood them. Be good, or get hit. He chose to be good. He went into a crouch and raised his hands in a small abbreviated gesture of surrender. I hefted the pry bar in my left hand and straight-armed the guy onward toward the head of the stairs. He was meek all the way down to the basement. He gave me no trouble on the way through the office room. Then we got to the second room and he saw the three guys on the floor and sensed what was in store for him. He tensed up. Adrenaline kicked in. Fight or flight. Then he looked at me again, a huge determined man in ludicrous shoes, holding a big metal bar.

He went quiet.

I asked him, “Do you know the combinations for the cells?”

He said, “No.”

“So how do you give painkiller injections?”

“Through the bars.”

“What happens if someone has a seizure and you can’t get in the cell?”

“I have to call.”

“Where is your equipment?”

“In my locker.”

“Show me,” I said. “Open it.”

We went back to the anteroom and he led me to a locker and spun the combination dial. The door swung open. I asked him, “Can you open any of the other cabinets?”

He said, “No, just this one.”

His locker had a bunch of shelves inside, piled high with all kinds of medical stuff. Wrapped syringes, a stethoscope, small phials of colorless liquids, packs of cotton balls, pills, bandages, gauze, tape.

Plus a shallow box of tiny nitrogen capsules.

And a box of wrapped darts.

Which made some kind of bureaucratic sense. I imagined the management conference back when they were writing the operations manual. The Pentagon. Staff officers in charge. Some junior ranks present. An agenda. Some DoD counsel insisting that the dart gun’s ammunition be held by a qualified medical officer. Because anesthetic was a drug. And so on and so forth. Then some other active-duty type saying that compressed nitrogen wasn’t medical. A third guy pointing out it made no sense at all to keep the propellant separate from the load. Around and around. I imagined exasperated agents eventually giving up and giving in. OK, whatever, let’s move on.

I asked, “What exactly is in the darts?”

The guy said, “Local anesthetic to help the wound site, plus a lot of barbiturate.”

“How much barbiturate?”

“Enough.”

“For a gorilla?”

The guy shook his head. “Reduced dose. Calculated for a normal human.”

“Who did the calculation?”

“The manufacturer.”

“Knowing what it was for?”

“Of course.”

“With specifications and purchase orders and everything?”

“Yes.”

“And tests?”

“Down at Guantánamo.”

“Is this a great country, or what?”

The guy said nothing.

I asked him, “Are there side effects?”

“None.”

“You sure? You know why I’m asking, right?”

The guy nodded. He knew why I was asking. I was fresh out of computer cords, so I had to keep half an eye on him while I found the gun and loaded it. Loading it was a jigsaw puzzle. I wasn’t familiar with the technology. I had to proceed on common sense and logic alone. Clearly the trigger mechanism tripped the gas release. Clearly the gas propelled the dart. But guns are basically simple machines. They have fronts and backs. Cause and effect happens in a rational sequence. I got the thing charged up inside forty seconds.

I said, “You want to lie down on the floor?”

The guy didn’t answer.

I said, “You know, to save bumping your head.”

The guy got down on the floor.

I asked him, “Any preference as to where? Arm? Leg?”

He said, “It works best into muscle mass.”

“So roll over.”

He rolled over and I shot him in the ass.

I reloaded the thing twice more and put darts into the two agents that were liable to wake up. Which gave me at least an eight-hour margin, unless there were other unanticipated arrivals on the horizon. Or unless the agents were supposed to call in with status checks every hour. Or unless there was a car already on its way to take us back to D.C. Which conflicting thoughts made me feel half-relaxed and half-urgent. I carried the pry bar through to the cell block. Jacob Mark looked at me and said nothing. Theresa Lee looked at me and said, “They sell shoes like that on Eighth Street now?”

I didn’t answer. Just stepped around to the back of her cell and jammed the flat end of the pry bar under the bottom of the structure. Then I leaned my weight on the bar and felt the whole thing move, just a little. Just a fraction of an inch. Not much more than the natural flex of the metal.

“That’s stupid,” Lee said. “This thing is a self-contained freestanding cube. You might be able to tip it over, but I’ll still be inside.”

I said, “Actually it’s not freestanding.”

“It’s not bolted to the floor.”

“But it’s clamped down by the sewer connection. Under the toilet.”

“Will that help?”

“I hope so. If I tip it up and the sewer connection holds, then the floor will tear off, and you can crawl out.”

“Will it hold?”

“It’s a gamble. It’s a kind of competition.”

“Between what?”

“Nineteenth-century legislation and a sleazy twenty-first-century welding shop with a government contract. See how the floor isn’t welded all the way around? Just in some places?”

“That’s the nature of spot welding.”

“How strong is it?”

“Plenty strong. Stronger than the toilet pipe, probably.”

“Maybe not. There was cholera in New York in the nineteenth century. A big epidemic. It killed lots of people. Eventually the city fathers figured out what was causing it, which was cesspools mixing with the drinking water. So they built proper sewers. And they specified all kinds of standards for the pipes and the connectors. Those standards are still in the building code, all these years later. A pipe like this has a flange lapping over the floor. I’m betting it’s fixed stronger than the spot welds. Those nineteenth-century public works guys erred on the side of caution. More so than some modern corporation wanting Homeland Security money.”

Lee paused a beat. Then she smiled, briefly. “So either I get illegally busted out of a government jail cell, or the sewer pipe gets torn out of the floor. Either way I’m in the shit.”

“You got it.”

“Great choice.”

“Your call,” I said.

“Go for it.”

Two rooms away I heard a telephone start to ring.

I knelt down and eased the tip of the pry bar into the position it needed to be in, which was under the bottom horizontal rail of the cell, but not so far under that it also caught the edge of the floor tray. Then I kicked it sideways a little until it was directly below one of the upside-down T-welds, where the force would be carried upward through one of the vertical bars.

Two rooms away the telephone stopped ringing.

I looked at Lee and said, “Stand on the toilet seat. Let’s give it all the help we can.”

She climbed up and balanced. I took up all the slack in the pry bar and then leaned down hard and bounced, once, twice, three times. Two hundred and fifty pounds of moving mass, multiplied by sixty inches of leverage. Three things happened. First, the pry bar dug itself a shallow channel in the concrete under the cage, which was mechanically inefficient. Second, the whole assemblage of bars distorted out of shape a little, which was also inefficient. But third, a bright bead of metal pinged loose and skittered away.

“That was a spot,” Lee called. “As in spot-weld.”

I moved the pry bar and found a similar position twelve inches to the left. Wedged the bar tight, took up the slack, and bounced. Same three results. The grind of powdered concrete, the screech of bending bars, and the ping of another metal bead torn loose.

Two rooms away a second phone started to ring. A different tone. More urgent.

I stood back and caught my breath. Moved the pry bar again, this time two feet to the right. Repeated the procedure, and was rewarded with another broken weld. Three down, many more to go. But now I had approximate hand-holds in the bottom rail, where the pry bar had forced shallow U-shaped bends into the metal. I put the pry bar down and squatted facing the cell and shoved my hands palms-up into the holds. Grasped hard and breathed hard and prepared to lift. When I quit watching the Olympics the weightlifters were moving more than five hundred pounds. I figured I was capable of much less than that. But I figured much less than that might do the trick.

Two rooms away the second telephone stopped ringing.

And a third started.

I heaved upward.

I got the side of the cell about a foot off the ground. The tread plate floor shrieked and bent like paper. But the welds held. The third telephone stopped ringing. I looked up at Lee and mouthed, “Jump.” She got the message. She was a smart woman. She jumped high off the toilet and smashed her bare feet down together right where two welds were under pressure. I felt nothing through my hands. No impact. No shock. Because the welds broke immediately and the floor bent down into a radical V-shaped chute. Like a mouth. The opening was about a foot wide and a foot deep. Good, but not good enough. A kid might have gotten through it, but Lee wasn’t going to.

But at least we had proved the principle. Score one for the nineteenth-century city fathers.

Two rooms away all three phones started to ring simultaneously. Competing tones, fast and urgent.

I caught my breath again and after that it was just a question of repeating the triple procedures over and over again, two welds at a time. The pry bar, the weightlifting, the jump. Lee wasn’t a big woman, but even so we needed to tear free a line of welds nearly six feet long before the floor would bend down enough to let her out. It was a question of simple arithmetic. The straight edge of the floor became part of a curved circumference, in a ratio of one-to-three against us. It took us a long time to get the job done. Close to eight minutes. But we got it done eventually. Lee came out on her back, feetfirst, like a limbo dancer. Her shirt got caught and rode up to reveal a smooth tan stomach. Then she wriggled free and crabbed clear and stood up and hugged me hard. And longer than she needed to. Then she broke away and I rested for a minute and wiped my hands on my pants.

Then I repeated the whole procedure all over again, for Jacob Mark.

Two rooms away phones rang and stopped, rang and stopped.