Gone Tomorrow

The third room stayed quiet.

I checked pockets. They were all empty. All sanitized. Nothing there at all, except neutral items like tissues and lonely dimes and pennies trapped down in the seams. No house keys, no car keys, no phones. Certainly no wallets, no badge holders, and no IDs.

I picked up the dart gun again and held it one-handed, out and ready. Moved to the third room’s door. Swung it open and raised the gun and pretended to aim. A gun is a gun, even if it’s empty and the wrong kind. It’s all about first impressions and subliminal reactions.

The third room was unoccupied.

No medical technician, no back-up agents, no support staff. Nobody at all. Nothing there, except grey office furniture and fluorescent light. The room itself was the same as the first two, an old brick basement chamber painted flat white. Same size, same proportions. It had another door, which I guessed led onward, either to a fourth room or a stairwell. I crossed to it and eased it open.

A stairwell. No paint, beyond an ancient peeling layer of institutional green. I closed the door again and checked the furniture. Three desks, five cabinets, four lockers, all grey, all plain and functional, all made of steel, all locked. With combination locks, like the cells, which made sense, because there had been no keys in the agents’ pockets. The desks held no piles of paper. Just three sleeping computers and three console telephones. I hit space bars and woke up each screen in turn. Each one asked for a password. I lifted receivers and hit redial buttons and got the operator every time. Extremely conscientious security. Painstaking, and consistent. Finish a call, dab the cradle, dial zero, hang up. The three guys weren’t perfect, but they weren’t idiots, either.

I stood still for a long moment. I was disappointed about the combination locks. I wanted to find their stores and reload the dart gun and shoot the other two agents with it. And I wanted my shoes.

I wasn’t going to get either satisfaction.

I padded my way back to the cells. Jacob Mark and Theresa Lee looked up, looked away, looked back. Classic double takes, because I was alone and I had the dart gun in my hands. I guessed they had heard the noises and assumed I was getting smacked around. I guessed they hadn’t expected me back so soon, or at all.

Lee asked, ‘What happened?’

I said, ‘They fell asleep.’

‘How?’

‘I guess my conversation bored them.’

‘So now you’re really in trouble.’

‘As opposed to what?’

‘You were innocent before.’

I said, ‘Grow up, Theresa.’

She didn’t answer. I checked the locks on the cell gates. They were fine items. They looked high quality and very precise. They had milled top-hat knobs graduated with neat engraving all around the edges, from the number one to the number thirty- six. The knobs turned both ways. I spun them and felt nothing at all in my fingers except the purr of slight and consistent mechanical resistance. The feel of great engineering. Certainly I didn’t feel any tumblers falling.

I asked, ‘Do you want me to get you out?’

Lee said, ‘You can’t.’

‘If I could, would you want me to?’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’

‘Because then you’d really be in trouble. If you stay, you’re living their game.’

She didn’t answer.

I said, ‘Jake? What about you?’

He asked, ‘Did you find our shoes?’

I shook my head. ‘But you could borrow theirs. They’re about your size.’

‘What about you?’

There are shoe stores on Eighth Street.’

‘You going to walk there barefoot?’

‘This is Greenwich Village. If I can’t walk around barefoot where can I?’

‘How can you get us out?’

‘Nineteenth-century problems and solutions, versus twenty-first-century expediency. But it will be difficult. So I need to know whether to start. And you need to make up your mind real quick. Because we don’t have much time.’

‘Before they wake up?’

‘Before the Home Depot closes.’

Jake said, ‘OK, I want out.’

I looked at Theresa Lee.

She said, ‘I don’t know. I didn’t do anything.’

‘Feel like sticking around and proving that? Because that’s hard to do. Proving a negative always is.’

She didn’t answer.

I said, ‘I was telling Sansom about how we studied the Red Army. You know what they were most afraid of? Not us. They were most afraid of their own people. Their worst torment was living their whole lives proving their own innocence, over and over again.’

Lee nodded.

‘I want out,’ she said.

‘OK,’ I said. I checked the things I needed to check. Estimated dimensions and weights by eye.

‘Sit tight,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back in less than an hour.’

* * *

First stop was the next room. The three federal agents were still out cold. The main guy would stay that way for eight solid hours. Or maybe much longer, because his body mass was less than two-thirds of mine. For a bad second it struck me that I might have killed him. A dose calibrated for a man of my size might have been dangerous for a smaller person. But the guy was breathing steadily right then. And he had started it, so the risk was his.

The other two would be waking up much earlier. Maybe fairly soon. Concussion was unpredictable. So I ducked through to the anteroom and tore all of the computer cords out of the walls and carried them back and used them to truss the two guys up like chickens. Wrists, elbows, ankles, necks, all tight and interconnected. Multistrand copper cores, tough plastic sheathing, unbreakable. I peeled my socks off and tied them together in line and used them for a gag on the guy with the head wound. Unpleasant for him, but I figured he was getting a hazardous duty supplement in his pay, and he might as well earn it. I left the other guy’s mouth alone. His nose was smashed, and gagging him would have been the same thing as suffocating him. I hoped he would appreciate my benevolence in the fullness of time.

I checked my work and reloaded my pockets with my possessions from the table and then I left the building.

FORTY- SIX

THE STAIRCASE LED UP TO THE FIRST FLOOR AND CAME out at the 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 navy 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.