As he hung up, his phone hummed again, an incoming text message. There was an attachment. When he opened it, he saw a crazed black-and-white square like a Mondrian block painting filling the tiny screen. It was a QR code, a square barcode with information embedded inside. It was by far the most intricate one he’d ever seen. Every QR code had smaller squares in the top two corners and in the bottom left, but normally those took up almost a fifth of the total space. On this code, the squares were so small they were barely visible to the naked eye, drowning in random pixelated lines. If a normal QR code could hold a URL, this one could probably store an entire book. Or at least an e-mail, he realized.
Which meant there could be another message within Sophie’s message. Secrets within secrets, Jake thought, answers hidden in plain sight. These secrets were going to have to wait a few minutes. He couldn’t get at them right now anyway, since he first had to storm a barricaded building single-handed. He put his phone away.
He wasn’t getting in through the front door unless he came back with some serious ordinance of his own. Even if the house had a back garden or patio, which a lot of the older brownstones did, it would be secured. Short of parachuting in, he didn’t have a lot of options. He looked up at the darkening sky.
That wasn’t true; there was one: below.
No one expected an attack from below. He knew this city—and especially its tunnel systems—like the back of his hand. He was basically a mole man. He spent most of his days down there, using long-forgotten access tunnels, cattle tunnels that weren’t on any map, and of course the original drainage sewers that predated modern Manhattan.
His sense of spatial awareness, overlaying the map of the city below on the city streets above, was sharp, and pushing himself up from the stoop and starting down the block back toward Broadway, he realized that there was a chance, a slim one, but a chance. This was more than he’d had a few minutes ago.
When his phone vibrated again, he snatched it up thinking it was Sophie. It wasn’t. It was Ryan.
The conversation was brief, Jake trying to say no, Ryan refusing to listen. It ended with Jake promising to meet up with him before he went underground, Ryan convincing him that assuming he did manage to infiltrate this secret society’s ultrasecret lair, the answers he was looking for weren’t going to be in a folder conveniently labeled
The Truth.
He was going to need Ryan.
Jake didn’t have a counterargument.
* * *
Half an hour later they trudged along the 1 line.
They’d entered the tunnels at the 96th Street station, grateful to duck out of the swirling storm as it finally took hold. There was a raised walkway along the side for MTA workers, which saved them from splashing through sewage and detritus that accumulated down there, and meant they weren’t walking directly on the wooden sleepers of the tracks either.
That didn’t change the fact that it was dark, dank, and reeked of filth and putrescence. Mercifully, there were no trains.
The Maglite Jake had acquired back at the relay station offered a little light. Ryan had come equipped, bringing a second, more powerful flashlight. Yet together they barely scratched the dark surface of the world below.
They kept moving. They didn’t talk, even though Ryan clearly had a thousand questions.
The subway tunnel walls were covered in graffiti—not all words and tags either. In New York, every available surface inevitably became an artist’s canvas, especially where they weren’t supposed to go. There were whole abandoned tunnel systems down here that were covered in so much paint they looked like the inside of a clown car, all riotous color and motion. The tags and images were sparser but still present, including a stick figure of a man running, a strange flower with a grinning evil smiley face at its center. There were eerily accurate renditions of the mayor of New York sucking an oversized cock right beside a caricature of Hillary fingering herself to a caption of
I still believe in a place called Hope.
That was as political a polemic as the underworld could offer. Equal-opportunity homemade porn. Ryan read a line out loud, “
God is nowhere. God is now here.
Trippy.” His voice carried far too loudly in the darkness but Jake didn’t shush him. That would have been worse.
It was a veritable gallery of street art. Some of it went back before Giuliani’s reign, a time capsule back to the sixties and seventies. Bob Marley smoked a giant reefer beside a newer painting of Kurt Cobain and Courtney with a declaration of
She shot the sheriff.
Jake figured they were almost back down near 91st now. They kept on walking. The art changed to a commentary on bankers, making the obvious visual gag.
A minute later a subway platform came into view. They kept on walking. It was the old 91st Street station, which had closed nearly sixty years before when the platform at 96th was extended. Closed meant that the stairs had been removed and the entrances at ground level sealed. Everything else remained. The tracks still ran through the old station stop, right past the deserted platforms.
As near as Jake could guess, they had to be somewhere close to the brownstone now. They hadn’t walked quite as far as the platform. “You don’t have to do this,” he whispered to Ryan.
“Are we gonna go through this again? Von’ll kill me if I let anything happen to you. So, like it or not, you’re stuck with me. Or, more accurately, I’m stuck with you.”
“I’m serious.”
“Deadly. Now,
shhh
, unless you want to get us caught.”
They began looking around, scanning the walls with their loops of cable and nailed wooden planking. The place was a warren of maintenance tunnels, complete with exits going off in seemingly every direction imaginable apart from up. Most of those tunnels came out in public buildings or between them, but if someone had wanted a place with its own escape hatch, they could have bought property directly above one of the old entrances and incorporated it into their own building. These guys had money; they were devious and secretive.
Jake was banking on them having secured a way out. It would involve real long-term thinking, but given everything he’d seen so far, these guys were playing exactly that game, and today’s events were very much the latest in a long line of well-executed moves. Buying the perfect building for their needs—months, even years in advance—didn’t seem like such a stretch.
The walls here were covered in years of grime and dirt and cast-off oil, but mixed in with the dark smears and spots were slashes and swirls of brighter color. Two splashes were made by a pair of weird symbols somewhere between drawings and oddly shaped letters.
Jake paused; they looked familiar. He shone the light directly on them. They were the same scrawls that the two graffiti artists had daubed on the walls right before the place blew up with them shouting about warriors. They were remarkably similar, if not identical.
“Over here,” he whispered. He ran the flashlight over the wall, ignoring the symbols themselves for a moment, instead looking for the shadows of a door. The wall was as unbroken and dirty as everything around it.
Ryan shone his own light all around the surface, letting it linger along the ground while he searched for telltale scratches. Nothing.
Frustrated, Jake kicked out, catching something that might have been a piece of burnt, twisted metal that had fallen from a train but could just as easily have been a lump of coal or a fire-blackened brick. It shattered from the force of the blow, fragments flying in a powdery explosion. Shreds of newspaper that had been stuck to the lump floated free, springing up before wafting slowly back down again.
Jake watched one of wisps of old paper drift down right by the wall, seemingly sliding halfway under it before finally settling to rest. He crouched down to study the spot where it landed. “Bring the light over here.”
Sure enough, he could just make out the darker shadow of a tiny gap beneath this section of wall. Which meant it was a fake front placed carefully to hide the real wall behind it. And what would you want to hide down here?
A door.
He didn’t see any obvious way to move the fake wall, but there had to be one, otherwise any door it concealed would be completely useless. They wouldn’t lock and bar their emergency exit. It needed to be easily accessible. Of course, it could have been only accessible from the inside, which would make sense. Exits were about getting out, not in.
“Don’t suppose you brought a fire ax, Rye?”
“It’d kinda fuck up the whole element of surprise, don’t you think?”
There had to be an edge. A weakness. It couldn’t be perfectly flush. Not given the nature of the ancient tunnels. Even if he couldn’t see it, it had to be there.
Jake started running his hand over the wall, feeling for any dips or gaps, anything he could slide a fingernail in to work loose. Ryan kept the beam pointed toward the surface of the wall.
Jake almost missed the tiny gap. The tip of his fingernail snagged on it as his hand brushed over the space. He stopped moving, then carefully ran his fingertips back over the area, slowly. “Here,” he whispered.
Ryan brought the flashlight’s beam up to focus on where that finger had been as Jake lifted it out of the way. At roughly shoulder height there was a narrow gap.
It wasn’t an accidental chip; the edges were neat and perfectly squared. It looked like a coin slot in a vending machine.
If this was the keyhole it was pretty clear no ordinary key was going to fit it. It had to be something only these guys would have, because they didn’t want some transit worker stumbling in through their back door. Something only they would have . . .
“Keep it steady,” Jake said, as he reached into his pocket and dug out the small gold pin. It went in far enough for its outer edge to line up precisely with the wall around it, no farther, earning a muted click from somewhere deep inside the hidden mechanism.
The fake wall shifted a couple of inches under his hands, creating a suddenly visible seam. Ryan wedged his fingers into that space and together they heaved it so the door could swing open. It wasn’t smooth or quiet as it dragged away across the rough ground.
Jake winced as it opened onto an old, battered metal door with a submarine-style capstan lock. The door was recessed in a dirt-smeared frame, solid steel, gunmetal gray.
“Shall we?”
Jake grasped the wheel and, after a moment’s resistance, felt it turn.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME, Finn thought as she collapsed into her chair.
Of course, it wasn’t really home, and out there the real world wasn’t exactly Oz, but in all the ways that counted her office was now more of a home than her apartment. She spent more time in this room than anywhere else in the world and, truth be told, had experienced more damn excitement here too. Through the window, she watched the snowfall thicken as it swirled. By morning it would be knee-deep.
She caught herself grinning at the memory of Jake.
Some time very soon she was going to have to have a word with herself, because she wasn’t prepared to be anyone’s dirty secret or their mistake. Simple as that. He was going to have to work hard for a second chance.
She wasn’t all that forgiving normally, but saving the world would be a start. Though it wouldn’t bring automatic forgiveness with it.
She grinned again.
Who am I kidding?
She’d considered heading back to her apartment for a nanosecond—the Port Authority adventure had left her drained and shaking when the aftereffects of the adrenaline receded—but the weather made that a fool’s errand. The odds were it was still without power and she didn’t like the idea of pacing around the tiny one-bedroom apartment in the dark, unable to relax or do anything useful while a storm raged outside. She wasn’t about to waste the evening cleaning kitchen countertops and folding laundry. She was tired, but there was no way she could sleep. So, the equation pretty much balanced on the side of work. Besides, there was an element of safety in numbers too. The campus was never deserted, even at this time of night.
“Let’s see what we’ve got, shall we?” she said aloud, typing in her password. She opened her e-mail and web browser. It took a minute for the pages to refresh. It was still faster than it had been that morning, so maybe the Internet, and therefore by association the rest of the world, was starting to recover a little?
She had a few new e-mails, but what caught her eye was a notification that new images from the dig site had been uploaded. That surprised her. It was the most obvious sign yet that normality was beginning to get a grip. Finn grabbed a water bottle from her little fridge and twisted the cap off, taking a long swig as she navigated over to the dig’s private page and opened the first of the new pictures. Then she sat back, sipping her water and watching as the gallery began to propagate on her screen.
Even as thumbnails it was obvious the new pictures were considerably better than the first batch, much sharper and cleaner. The water down there must be incredibly clear and almost without undercurrent or motion, because in most of the shots Finn had to consciously remind herself that these ruins were underwater. It was only the soft, diffuse lighting that gave it away. There wasn’t a single place in all North America that looked like this, she was absolutely sure of that. Several images offered close-ups of the buildings, zoomed in on the markings carved into them.
Finn created blank pages in her imaging program and traced each symbol methodically so she could study them more easily without the distraction of the environment to lead her thoughts to any particular conclusion. By the time she was finished adding the new symbols to the file she’d already started, her vision had a blurred sleep-deprived quality, but she was absolutely certain of one thing: these markings were not Egyptian.
She’d thought that already from the initial images, but now she was sure. Everything about the images suggested they were in some way related to hieroglyphics, but at the same time they had too many dissimilarities to simply be different presentation styles. Which begged the obvious question: what
were
they?