Next Victim (32 page)

They moved into the central car.

"My friend told me IAD has been taking a long look at that detective you paired up with—Dodge. Dodge doesn’t know it, but they’ve got him down for passing confidential information to the media. Specifically, to this Levine guy at Channel Eight."

"So it
was
him," Tess muttered.

"Yeah. And IAD’s closing in. This Dodge guy’s about to be in a whole lot of trouble."

"Not anymore. He’s dead."

It was Tennant’s turn to look up in surprise. "Courtesy of Mobius?"

"Exactly."

"Well, then I guess his problems are over. And so are yours, as far as the leak situation is concerned."

"You say you already told Andrus?"

"Called him as soon as I knew."

"How long ago?"

"Hour, maybe."

"Would’ve been nice if he’d gotten in touch with me."

"He’s a cold fish, that guy. I don’t—Whoops, here we go."

He was crouching by a seat. Tess knelt beside him and saw a squarish package wrapped in aluminum foil, taped to the seat bottom.

Duct-taped. Of course.

She stared at it, aware that she was looking at a bomb of some sort, probably not very powerful, but carrying a deadly payload of nerve agent.

"He planted it during the northbound run." Her thoughts came in a rush, her brain pressed into high gear. "Would’ve wanted it to go off when the train was southbound. Ideally, under the mountains. That would be the longest stretch of uninterrupted tunnel."

"Train’s been sitting at this station for a good ten minutes," Tennant said. "Bomb might go off at any second. Safest thing is to get out of here, let it blow."

"Then we lose the evidence."

"We don’t need evidence to identify him."

"But we may need it to get a conviction."

"Shit." Tennant looked at the package.

"Can you disarm one of these things?"

"Maybe. I did a little munitions work in Vietnam. All right, get out and let me handle it."

"No way."

"It’s not a two-person job."

"Yes, it is. I’ll hold the flashlight. You need both hands free."

"If it blows—"

"We get splashed, and we die. That’s a good reason to hurry up and get started, don’t you think?"

Tennant put down his flashlight, and Tess aimed hers at the package. Carefully Tennant peeled away the tinfoil, uncovering a gradated glass cylinder—a test tube—stoppered at one end, filled with amber liquid.

"VX," Tess said, for no good reason.

Taped to the test tube was a wad of puttylike explosive. A wire extending from the charge was soldered into the guts of a small, battery-operated traveler’s alarm clock.

"Standard electrically initiated explosive device," Tennant said. "Alarm acts as a triggering switch, sends a current through the ignition wire—and blows the test tube to bits."

"Scattering VX everywhere."

"You got it."

In the movies a bomb’s timer helpfully displayed the minutes and seconds remaining until detonation. Here the clock’s digital display merely showed the current time, 10:41. The alarm could be set for 10:42 or 11:00 or any time at all. There was no way to know.

It felt to Tess as if an hour had passed already, and Tennant still hadn’t gone to work on the device. "What are you waiting for?" she asked in a voice she hoped was steady.

"Fancy bombs can have a tilt switch or even a radio receiver for remote detonation."

"Great." She was liking this less and less. At least now she understood why Tennant had wanted her cell phone turned off.

"I doubt Mobius would be that goddamn clever. The guy’s a serial killer, not a Special Forces op."

"Is that what you were? In Vietnam?"

"Just a grunt." He spent an endless stretch of time studying the test tube. "I don’t see any funny business. We—"

As Tess watched, the clock’s LED readout changed to 10:42. They both froze, waiting.

Nothing happened.

"Better get this thing defused," Tennant said. "We might not be so lucky a minute from now."

Gently he took hold of the ignition wire and tried to ease it free of the explosive charge.

"Won’t move. Glued down or something. Got any tools on you?"

"Tools?"

"Wire cutters, needle-nose pliers, anything like that?"

She was going to ask him why she would possibly be carrying needle-nose pliers around, when she remembered the nail clipper in her purse. She dug it out. "Will this work?"

"It’ll have to."

He snagged the wire between the clipper’s tiny jaws, then worked it back and forth.

"Almost got it."

Click.

The wire was cut.

And the alarm went off.

The sudden loud buzzing noise startled Tess so badly she nearly dropped the flashlight. Tennant, she noticed, didn’t even flinch.

"Made it by a good two or three seconds," he said with satisfaction. "No problem."

Tess wasn’t sure she saw it that way, but she was alive, anyway. And there was one other good thing.

"He’s shot his wad," she said. "Used up the nerve agent. Right?"

Tennant shook his head. "Unfortunately, no. From what I can tell, there’s only about two hundred ccs of VX in this tube. Meaning there’s still five hundred ccs left unaccounted for."

Tess sagged against a handrail. "So he’s doling it out a little at a time. Working up to his big strike."

"Looks that way." Tennant frowned. "And if taking out a trainload of passengers is his idea of a warm-up act, I don’t want to see the main event."

39

Tess was still trembling a little as she disembarked from the train, leaving Tennant to remove the disarmed bomb and search for any secondary devices.

By now the station was crowded with uniformed cops, federal agents, and assorted emergency personnel. The loudspeaker finally had fallen silent, but the confusion of voices was nearly as loud.

Amid the hubbub she saw Andrus, Michaelson, and another man engaged in intense discussion near the platform. She wondered what Michaelson was doing here, but the answer was obvious—once the news had gone public, it would have been pointless to keep him off the task force any longer, and probably impossible, as well.

She approached at a fast clip, catching pieces of their conversation.

"…couldn’t get out," Andrus said. "The police are checking everyone who exits."

"Well, he’s not in here." That was the unknown man, who had the stiff, flustered looked of a bureaucrat in over his head. "The hiding places…"

"…sure?"

"…all searched…reviewing the tapes at the ROC office now."

"Maybe McCallum was wrong." Michaelson, of course. "Maybe he was never on this train."

"He was on it," Tess said. They all turned to her as she stepped up to the group. "Tennant and I just found the package he left."

"Package?" the bureaucrat said. The laminated card hanging around his neck read DOBBMAN, MTA.

"A bomb. A nerve-agent bomb. Don’t worry; Tennant defused it." She gave them a rundown of events.

"Well, in any case, he’s not here," Dobbman of the MTA said. "He didn’t exit the station, and he’s not still inside."

Andrus asked him if there was any way to get off the train between stops.

"Impossible. The doors can be opened only by the operator. They’re never opened while the train is in motion."

"So what the hell happened to him?" Michaelson asked. "Did he just disappear like a goddamn ghost?"

"He’s not a ghost," Tess said. "But maybe there’s another way for him to dematerialize. Let’s say, in all the confusion of evacuating the riders, Mobius separates from the crowd and slips off the platform—into the dark."

The three men looked at her, then shifted their gazes toward the train, the track, and the tunnels beyond.

"You think he’s in there?" Andrus said, as if testing the idea by speaking it aloud.

"That’s crap," Michaelson blurted. "He wouldn’t go someplace where he’s cornered."

"Who says he’s cornered?" Tess looked at the MTA rep. "There must be ways to get in and out of those tunnels."

Dobbman nodded. "Of course there’s access. Maintenance exits, air vents, storm drains. But he wouldn’t know how to find them."

"Yes, he would. He’s a civil engineer, and he worked on the Red Line. He’s seen the blueprints."

There was a long moment before anyone spoke.

"All right," Andrus said finally, "let’s take a look."

The tunnel was wide and dark, with rounded walls lined in concrete and plastic to prevent any seepage from methane gas pockets in the rock. Faint echoes of dripping noises echoed in the distance.

There were two tunnels bored through the mountains, one for northbound train traffic, the other for return trips. Each tunnel, Dobbman of the MTA had reported, was roughly twenty-three feet in diameter and more than twelve thousand feet long. Trains were powered by an electrified third rail, producing 750 volts, that lay adjacent to the tracks. He had warned them to stay clear of it.

Tess intended to heed that advice. She kept her distance from the tracks as she advanced into the darkness, leaving the lights of the platform behind. Andrus and Michaelson flanked her, with four LAPD officers arrayed in pairs to the front and rear. They were headed north. Another search team had gone in the opposite direction.

She should have felt safe, surrounded by armed professionals and carrying a gun herself, but all she could think of was Mobius popping up out of the shadows to splash her with liquid death.

She had survived the nerve-agent attack in her motel room, then the shoot-out in the hills. Already tonight, Mobius had failed twice to kill her.

Third time’s the charm?

"What’s she doing here anyway?"

The question, as startling as a slap, came from Michaelson.

"It’s come to my attention," Andrus said, "that there’s a more likely suspect in the news leak."

"You can say his name," Tess put in. "It doesn’t matter now. He’s dead. Mobius—I mean, Hayde—killed him." To Michaelson she said, "It was Detective Dodge, the cop I was working with."

Michaelson wouldn’t let it go. He looked at Andrus. "You’re sure he was the leaker?"

"We know he’d passed other things to the same reporter. Internal Affairs was after him."

"That doesn’t prove he was peddling the info this time. It still could’ve been McCallum."

Still talking about her in the third person. She was really getting tired of that.

"Dodge had an ongoing relationship with Myron Levine," Tess said as calmly as possible. "And Dodge knew everything I knew."

"How convenient for you."

"What are you saying? That I’m trying to pin the blame on a dead man?"

"Who knows what you might try when your career’s on the line?"

"God, you’re such a prick."

He ignored her, as usual. "As far as I’m concerned, McCallum remains an unreliable member of this investigative team."

She wouldn’t let this pass. "Sometimes I think I’m the
only
member of the team who’s doing any actual investigating. In case you’ve forgotten, I got you Hayde’s license plate and directed you to the Metro. I practically handed you Mobius on a platter—"

"You did?" The Nose glared past her, refusing to meet her eyes. "Then where is he, McCallum? If you’ve handed him to us, why don’t we have him?"

Andrus held up a stern hand. "
Enough
. Agent McCallum is back on the case. Period. And for the record, Tess," he added, "I apologize for jumping to conclusions. I made a mistake. I’m sorry."

The Nose made a low sound signifying disapproval and turned away.

When Tess looked back, the Metro train had receded into the distance. Its headlights cast only a dim glow. The lights of the station platform were entirely gone, hidden behind the curving wall of concrete and rock.

"How far are we planning to go, anyway?" Michaelson asked.

Tess thought the Nose was in an awful hurry to give up the chase. Probably didn’t like being in the dark. She hoped he wet his pants.

"Until we find some indication he’s been here," Andrus said. "Shoe prints or something."

"Not a sign of him so far," Tess said. She’d been expecting the tunnel to be strewn with litter from tunnel workers—gum wrappers, cigarette butts, soda cans—but it was surprisingly clean. Other than some scattered papers blown off the platform by the draft of passing trains, the circle of her flashlight beam had picked up nothing but the train tracks, the dangerous third rail, and the small metallic heads of the automatic sprinklers installed between the tracks.

They walked on. Now the train was lost to sight, and only their flashlights provided illumination. It was like exploring a cave, but a curiously artificial cave of unchanging dimensions, a cave that stretched forever into the darkness.

Still no indication that anyone had passed this way. Maybe no one had. She could have been wrong.

Andrus got on the radio to the other search team. They had found nothing. The tunnel’s dirt floor south of the parked train seemed undisturbed.

"We’re wasting our time," Michaelson groused.

Andrus looked at Tess. "How about it? Keep going or turn back?"

"Since when is it my call?"

"Since you’re the one who came up with this idea."

"Fair enough." She let the pale oval of her flashlight beam drift over the walls. "If he’s in here, he could be a mile away by now. Or he might have exited via a maintenance access tunnel. I guess we should head back."

It felt like the right choice. But she wished she could be sure.

Tess and the others were retracing their steps, nearing the platform, when Michaelson said, "Hold on."

He beamed his flashlight into the gully between the rails. Among the sprinkler heads, its beam picked out something small and shiny, something that could not have lain there long without being caked in grit.

He and Tess and Andrus gathered around the find, while the patrol cops watched the shadows, wary of a surprise attack.

Three flashlight beams centered on the object. It was a cuff link—silver border, black pearl inset.