Reliquary (48 page)

“I’ll need a weapon, sir,” Snow said.

“Get him something.” Somebody thrust the butt of a harpoon gun into Snow’s gut, and he quickly looped the strap over his shoulder. He thought he heard somebody sniggering quietly, but he ignored it. Snow had speared plenty of fish in the Sea of Cortez, but he’d never seen spears quite as long or as evil-looking as the ones that hung from the underbelly of this gun, fat explosive charges packed at their ends.

“Don’t shoot any crocodiles,” Donovan said. “They’re endangered.” It was the first time he’d spoken.

The throb of the engines grew deeper, and the boat eased up to a cement landing beneath the dark outline of the Lower Hudson Sewage Treatment Plant. Snow looked up at the enormous concrete structure with a sinking feeling. It was fully automated, supposedly state of the art, but he’d heard the facility had seen nothing but problems since going on-line almost five years before. He hoped to God he was right about going in through the main settling tanks.

“Think we ought to alert them that we’re coming?” Snow asked.

Rachlin looked at him, faint amusement on his face. “Way ahead of you. Took care of things while you were belowdecks. They’ll be expecting us.”

A Jacob’s ladder was thrown over the side, and the men quickly scrambled down to the landing. Snow looked around, orienting himself. He recognized the area from the Basic tour: the control room was not far off. The team followed him up a metal staircase, then past a large array of aeration and set-ding tanks. The smell of methane and sewage hung in the air like a mephitic fog. At the far end of the tanks, Snow stopped at a metal door, bright yellow against the monotonous gray of the facility, with painted red letters:
DO NOT OPEN DOOR, ALARM WILL SOUND.
Rachlin brushed Snow aside and kicked the door open, revealing a spare cement corridor blazing with white fluorescent light. A siren began, low and insistent.

“Move out,” Rachlin said quietly.

Snow led them up a double flight of stairs, and onto a landing marked
CONTROL.
There was a set of doors on the landing, with a carded entry system set into the wall beside them. The Commander stood back, preparing to kick in the doors again. Then, reconsidering, he moved forward and nudged one with his hand. It swung open, unlocked.

Beyond was a vast room, flooded with light and full of the odor of treated sewage. Monitoring equipment and regulators lined the walls. In the center, a lone supervisor sat at the control station. He hung up the phone on his desk, his hair disheveled, blinking as if the telephone had roused him out of a sound sleep.

“Do you know who that was,” he exclaimed, pointing at the phone. “Holy God, that was the Deputy Director of the--”

“Good,” Rachlin replied. “Then I won’t have to waste any time. We need you to shut down the main outflow propeller right now.”

The man blinked at Rachlin as if seeing him for the first time. Then his gaze traveled down the line of SEALs, growing more wide-eyed as he went.

“Damn,” he said almost reverently, staring at Snow’s harpoon gun. “He wasn’t kidding, was he?”

“Hurry up, now, darlin’,” Rachlin drawled, “or we’ll throw you in the tank and let your fat old carcass shut it down for us.”

The man jumped to his feet, trotted over to a panel, and flipped several levers, “Five minutes is the most I can spare,” he said over his shoulder as he moved toward another bank of controls. “Any longer, and everything west of Lenox Avenue will back up.”

“Five minutes is all we’ll need.” Rachlin looked at his watch. “Get us to the settling tank.”

Panting softly, the supervisor led the team back out to the landing, down one flight, and along a narrow corridor. At the far end, he opened a small access door and descended a spiral staircase of painted red metal. The staircase opened onto a small walkway that hung suspended a few feet above a foamy, roiling surface.

“You really going down in that?” the man asked, looking them over once again with the same expression of disbelief on his jowled face.

Snow looked down at the foamy, scum-laden surface, nose wrinkling involuntarily, regretting he’d been in the office that evening, and deeply regretting that he’d suggested this as an entry point.
First the Humboldt Kill, and now
--

“That’s an affirmative,” the Commander replied.

The man licked his lips. “You’ll find the main feeder five feet below the surface, on the east side of the tank,” he said. “Watch out for the propeller valve. I’ve turned it off, but the residual flow will still be turning the blades.”

Rachlin nodded. “And the first riser is where exactly?”

“Three hundred twenty feet down the feeder,” the supervisor said. “Keep to your left as the pipes divide.”

“That’s all we need to know,” Rachlin said. “Get on upstairs, now, and fire everything back up as soon as you get there.”

The man paused, still staring at the group.

“
Move
!” Rachlin barked, and the man scampered up the staircase.

Snow went first, falling backwards into the bubbling vat, followed by Donovan. When he gingerly opened his eyes, he was surprised at how clear the effluent was: thin, not treacly, and with the faintest milky cast. The others jumped in. He could feel the wetness creeping against his skin, and tried not to think about it.

Snow swam forward against the slight current. Ahead, he could see the stalled propellers of the outflow valve blocking the circular pipe beyond, the steel blades still turning slowly. He stopped and let Rachlin and the other teams catch up, until the seven SEALs were all hanging suspended beside them. Rachlin pointed to Snow, then made an exaggerated count with his fingers. At three, Snow and Donovan darted through the propellers. Alpha Team was next, then Beta, then Gamma.

Snow found himself within a massive stainless steel pipe, leading on into vast, dark depths.

The same creeping terror he’d felt in the mud of Humboldt Kill threatened to bubble once again to the surface, but he fought it back, slowing his breathing, mentally counting his heartbeats. No panic, not this time.

Rachlin and his partner swam through the blades, then Rachlin made a sharp gesture to Snow to continue. He quickly moved ahead, leading the other teams down the tunnel. Behind him, Snow heard the whine of a turbine, and the propeller began to pick up speed. The current around him quickened noticeably. No going back now, even if he wanted to.

The tunnel angled downward, forking once, then twice. Snow kept to the left each time. After what seemed like an eternity of swimming, the squad stopped at last beside the first vent riser, a narrow steel shaft barely wider than his shoulders. Rachlin indicated that he would take the lead from here. Following the SEALs, Snow swam downward, awash in bubbles from the preceding air tanks. After several yards, the Commander stopped the descent, then led them into a horizontal tube even narrower than the riser. Snow squeezed in behind Donovan, breathing hard as his tanks bounced from wall to wall in time to the motion of his swimming.

Suddenly, gleaming steel gave way to old iron pipe, covered with a spongy coating of rust. The passage of the previous divers swirled the effluent an opaque orange against Snow’s mask. He struggled forward, feeling the reassuring turbulence from Donovan’s unseen fins. They stopped briefly while Rachlin consulted his map with the aid of a submersible penlight. Then two more bends, another short rise, and Snow felt the surface of the water break around his head. They were in a huge ancient passageway, perhaps sixteen feet in diameter and full to half its depth in sluggishly flowing liquid. The Main Lateral.

“Snow and Donovan to the rear,” came the muffled voice of Rachlin. “Stay on the surface but keep breathing tank air. This atmosphere’s likely to be loaded with methane. Proceed in standard formation.” The Commander quickly consulted a plastic map hooked to his suit, and then started forward.

The group spread out, swimming along the surface, tracing a circuitous route through the system of pipes. Snow prided himself on his ability as a distance swimmer, but he felt distinctly outclassed by the seven men moving easily through the water ahead of him.

The passageway opened at last into a large pentagonal chamber, yellow stalactites dripping water from the vaulted ceiling. Snow stared with amazement at a massive iron chain hanging from a metal eye cleat set in the vault’s apex. A trickle of water ran down the chain, off a great rusted hook at its end, and dribbled into the pool. There was a cement landing streaked with rust. Three large, dry tunnels branched off from the walls of the chamber.

“Three Points,” Rachlin said. “We’ll use this as our rally base. The op should be a cakewalk, but we’ll do it by the book. Follow strict challenge-and-reply procedures: proper response will be three even numbers. The rules of engagement are simple. Identify yourself, but shoot to kill any threat or hindrance to your work. Extraction point will be the One Hundred Twenty-fifth Street Canal.” The Commander looked around. “All right, gentlemen, let’s earn our MREs.”

= 57 =

For a dreadful moment Margo thought they were under attack, and she turned instinctively, raising her weapon to the ready position, strangely reluctant to look at the thing Pendergast was struggling with. There was a whispered curse from D’Agosta. Squinting through the still-unfamiliar goggles, Margo realized Pendergast was grappling with a person, perhaps a homeless man who had evaded the police roust. He certainly looked the part: wet, caked in mud, apparently bleeding from some unseen wound.

“Shut off the light,” Pendergast hissed. D’Agosta’s flashlight beam struck her goggles, then winked out. The glowing vista seesawed violently as her goggles tried to compensate, corning back into focus as they stabilized. She drew her breath in sharply. There was something about the lanky features, the tousled hair, that was irresistibly familiar.

“Bill?” she asked in disbelief.

Pendergast had the man on the ground, hugging him almost protectively, murmuring words into one ear. After a moment, the man stopped struggling and went limp. Pendergast released him gently and stood up. Margo leaned in for a closer look. It was Smithback, all right. .

“Give him a minute,” Pendergast said.

“I don’t believe it,” D’Agosta growled. “What, you think he followed us down here?”

Pendergast shook his head. “No. Nobody followed us.” He looked around at the confluence of tunnels above and below. “This is the Bottleneck, where all descending tunnels of the Central Park quadrant meet. He was being chased, apparently, and his path intersected ours. The question is, chased by whom? Or what?” He unshipped his flamethrower and glanced at D’Agosta. “You’d better be ready with the flash, Vincent.”

Suddenly, Smithback lunged upwards, then fell back onto the mass of pipes and twenty-four-inch mains that made up the floor of the Bottleneck.

“They killed Duffy!” he cried. “Who are you? Help me, I can’t see!”

Pocketing her weapon, Margo came forward and knelt at his side. The trip down from the subway tunnel--through noisome corridors and dark, echoing galleries that seemed incredibly out of place dozens of stories beneath Manhattan--had been like an endless dark dream. Seeing her friend race out of the darkness, petrified with fear and shock, only increased her sense of unreality.

“Bill,” she said soothingly. “It’s okay. It’s Margo. Please keep quiet. We don’t dare use lights, and there isn’t a spare set of goggles. But we’ll help you along.”

Smithback blinked in her direction, pupils wide. “I want to get out of here!” he cried suddenly, struggling to his feet.

“What?” D’Agosta said sarcastically. “And miss your story?”

“You can’t go back alone,” Pendergast said, putting a restraining arm on his shoulder.

The struggle seemed to have exhausted Smithback, and he sagged forward. “What are you doing here?” he asked at last.

“I might ask you the same question,” Pendergast replied. “Mephisto is leading us to the Astor Tunnels--the Devil’s Attic. There was a plan to drain the Reservoir and flood the creatures out.”

“Captain Waxie’s plan,” D’Agosta added.

“But the Reservoir is full of the Mbwun lily. That’s where the creatures were growing it. And we can’t allow the plants to reach the open ocean. It’s too late to stop the water dump, so a SEAL team was sent in from the river to seal the lowest spillway tunnels below. We’re going to seal off the spaces
above
the Astor Tunnels to prevent any spillages. We’ll bottle up the flow, keep it from escaping down into the river. If we succeed, it will back up to the Bottleneck here, but nowhere else.”

Smithback remained unspeaking, his head bowed.

“We’re well armed, and fully prepared for whatever’s down there. We have maps. You’ll be safer with us. Do you understand, William?”

Margo watched as Pendergast’s mellifluous delivery worked its calming effect. Smithback’s breathing seemed to slow, and finally he nodded almost imperceptibly.

“So what were
you
up to, anyway?” D’Agosta asked.

Pendergast made a restraining motion with one hand, but Smithback looked in the direction of the Lieutenant. “I followed Captain Waxie and a group of policemen underneath the Reservoir,” he said quietly. “They were trying to shut off some valves. But they’d been sabotaged, or something. Then--” He stopped abruptly. “Then
they
came.”

“Bill, don’t,” Margo interjected.

“I ran away,” Smithback said, swallowing hard. “Duffy and I ran away. But they caught him in the gauging station. They--”

“That’s enough,” said Pendergast quietly. There was a silence. “Sabotage, did you say?”

Smithback nodded. “I heard Duffy say that somebody had been messing with the valves.”

“That is troublesome. Troublesome indeed.” There was a look on Pendergast’s face that Margo had not seen before. “We’d better continue,” he said, shouldering the flamethrower again. “This Bottleneck is a perfect place for an ambush.” He glanced around the dark tunnel. “Mephisto?” he whispered.

There was a stirring in the darkness, then Mephisto came forward, arms folded across his chest, a wide smirk on his whiskered lips.