A
FEW MINUTES BEFORE
the alarms went off, the public tour of the U.S. Capitol was running behind schedule. So Conrad was still inside the original north wing, impatiently standing outside the Old Supreme Court chamber, staring at a plaque that read:
Beneath this tablet is the original cornerstone for this building.
Like most things coming out of Washington, D.C., the plaque wasn’t entirely true, as the pleasant docent explained to the group, which included a dozen Boy Scouts from Wyoming.
“The plaque on the wall refers to the tablet on the floor before you, and the tablet on the floor only marks the spot where a former Architect of the Capitol once believed the cornerstone resided.”
Conrad looked down at the stone, which was about four feet wide and two feet tall and embedded into the floor, and read the engraving:
LAID MASONICALLY SEPT. 17, 1932
IN COMMEMORATION OF THE LAYING
OF THE ORIGINAL CORNERSTONE BY
GEORGE WASHINGTON
“So we’ve got plaques commemorating stones in commemoration of other stones,” muttered the scoutmaster next to Conrad in the back as the group finally headed to the crypt. “Am I missing something?”
“Just your federal tax dollars,” Conrad replied and looked at his watch. The Capitol Police were probably already sending text alerts
to higher-ups and it was all going to trickle down in a very loud display of alarms any second now.
The tour ended at the crypt under the rotunda, where George Washington was supposed to be buried. It was a vast chamber with 40 massive Doric columns of Virginia sandstone, upon which rested the rotunda and dome above, much like America itself rested on Washington. In the center of the black marble floor was a white starburst.
“This crypt is the heart of Washington, D.C., and the end of our tour,” the docent said. “Following Pierre L’Enfant’s design, the city’s four quadrants all originate at the U.S. Capitol. The starburst on the floor of this crypt is the center.”
The starburst marked what was to be a window into the tomb of George Washington beneath the crypt. The idea was that Washington could look up from his tomb and ultimately see his glorified self in heaven as painted on the ceiling of the Capitol dome. Only Washington wasn’t in the tomb below—his widow Martha had insisted he be buried at the couple’s Mount Vernon estate.
As the tourists took turns standing on the starburst, Conrad drifted off to the wide marble staircase nearby and walked down to the subbasement level of the Capitol, passing several glass-enclosed offices packed like mouse cages.
He took an immediate right back under the stairs and passed a sign that read “No visitors allowed,” just as the public alarms went off.
Now he had to move fast. He had only minutes to find the cornerstone before the Haz-Mat teams reached the subbasement levels.
He glanced back at the small warren of offices behind him. Staffers, mostly scruffy middle-aged types with PDAs, were shaking their heads, gathering belongings and heading for the exits. Conrad proceeded up a few crumbling stone steps, passing a nuclear fallout shelter sign as he entered a long, yellow brick tunnel.
He pulled out his modified smartphone and looked at the screen with the schematics and GPS tracker. Conrad was the white flashing dot in the maze.
At the end of the tunnel was a black iron gate like something out of a medieval church, and beyond the gate the tomb intended for George and Martha Washington. The only thing inside the tomb was
the catafalque, the structure on which the corpse of Abraham Lincoln, the first president to die in office, rested when he lay in state for public viewing in the rotunda after his assassination.
Conrad turned to his right and saw the rust-colored access door he was looking for. It was marked:
SBC4M
DANGER
Mechanical Equipment
Authorized Personnel Only
It had no handle or knob, but he thought he could pry it open. As he did, he heard the scrape of metal against stone behind him, and turned to see the metal door marked SB-21 on the opposite side of the tunnel open.
A technician emerged in a work outfit and a look of surprise when he saw Conrad. “There’s an evacuation alert, sir.”
“Yes, they’re passing these out.” Conrad pulled a surgical mask from his suit pocket. “Take it,” he said and smothered it over the man’s mouth.
Conrad pushed him back through the door, and the man crumpled to the floor next to some electrical machinery. Conrad closed the door behind him, picked up the chloroform-soaked mask and dragged the technician past a bank of equipment and exposed piping to a utility room.
Inside he found a single marble bathtub, a relic of the old Senate spa that offered members of Congress and their guests hot tubs, haircuts, and massages. He put the man inside the tub, closed the utility door and moved down to the old furnace area.
According to the GPS marker on his phone, he was near enough to the northeast corner of the central portion of the Capitol to use his pocket sonar. He popped what looked like a memory card into the slot atop the handheld device. A thermal-like image of red and yellow splotches against a glowing green backdrop filled the small screen.
DARPA had developed the pocket sonar for Special Ops forces searching for small underground structures like caves that could serve as hiding places for weapons of mass destruction or tunnels
for smuggling weapons and terrorist infiltrators across borders. Conrad had adapted the sonar for exploring megalithic pyramids and temples in order to find and map his own secret chambers and passageways. Today he was looking for a hollow space in a foundation stone—the cornerstone.
He had done it once before, under remarkably similar circumstances, when he helped historians in Hawaii find a long-lost time capsule buried by King Kamehameha V in the cornerstone of the landmark Aliiolani Hale building. They knew the cornerstone contained photos of royal families dating back to Kamehameha the Great and the constitution of the Hawaiian kingdom. What they didn’t know was its exact location. Conrad helped them find it within ten minutes, using his pocket sonar to locate the hollow spot in the northeast corner of the building.
He had to beat that record now.
Conrad watched the screen of the sonar as he made his way toward the southeast corner beneath the original north wing. For a second he thought he had something, but it turned out to be an old grating in the stone that led to the massive steam pipes.
There are miles of underground utility pipes that provide heat and steam from the Capitol Power Plant to the Capitol campus and surrounding areas. And these miles and miles of pipes were maintained by a team of ten employees from the office of the Architect of the Capitol.
Ten men to maintain miles of underground pipes.
His GPS tracker beeped and then he saw it, the dirt trench he was looking for. It was about three feet wide and four feet deep, dug by a previous Architect of the Capitol along with members of the U.S. Geological Survey. They had used metal detectors to look for the silver cornerstone plate beneath the stone, but had never found it.
If only they had used sonar,
he thought.
If only they had dug a few feet in the opposite direction
.
Conrad aimed the sonar at the wall of large foundation stones to his right. The metamorphic sandstone had been ferried here on boats from quarries in Aquia, Virginia. And on the other side should be the northeast corner of the central section.
He watched the screen…
Ping!
He found a hollow space within the rock and made a crooked X on the stone with a marker. His hand was shaking.
The cornerstone of the U.S. Capitol. This is it! The very stone that Washington laid on September 18, 1793.
Based on the way it was set in the bedrock, it was slightly bigger than he expected—about two feet high and four feet wide.
This was the good part, he thought, the part the Hawaiians wouldn’t let him do with the cornerstone back at the Aliiolani Hale. They said digging it up would destroy the building above, which was also a historic treasure. But you didn’t have to dig it up to dig out what was inside.
He pulled out his pocket microwave drill, an incredibly useful tool originally developed at Tel Aviv University. The drill bit was a needle-like antenna that emitted intense microwave radiation. The microwaves created a hot spot around the bit, melting or softening the material so that the bit could be pushed in.
Conrad had used it beneath the Great Pyramid in Giza to slip a fiber optic camera into a previously closed shaft, much to the dismay of the Director General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, who liked to stage live “opening the tomb” spectacles for the American television networks.
If only this were televised
, he thought,
I’d be an American hero, maybe get “Ancient Riddles” back on the air. The feds could keep the damn globe so long as I got credit for the find. Then Serena and I…
The dream always got fuzzy in the end, because it was never going to happen with him and Serena. Not in this life, which was about to come to an abrupt end if he didn’t finish this job.
With steady hands now, he began to bore a hole a centimeter wide through the sandstone, watching the tip of the drill bit glow an intense purple. The beauty of the microwave was that it was silent and didn’t create dust. The only downside was the intense microwave radiation the drill produced. The shielding plate in front of the drill bit seemed awfully small to Conrad, who began to drip with sweat.
It was done in less than sixty seconds. Conrad cut the heat and pulled out the drill wire. He then snaked the fiber optic line through the hole and looked at the screen on his handheld device. The hair-
thin cable emitted its own light and would give him a view inside the cavity of the cornerstone.
A few seconds later he saw it: nothing. The cavity was there, but it was empty.
Damn.
He leaned back in the dark, dumbfounded. Why would the Masons drop a recessed cornerstone and not put anything inside? It made no sense.
There was a movement behind him. Conrad turned. A man in a Haz-Mat mask stepped forward into the dim light. He removed his mask and reached for a radio.
“This is Pierce,” he called in. “Alert sublevel 2, old furnace area. Suspect cornered.”
“You people got here sooner than I thought,” Conrad said, clenching his right fist around his handheld. “That’s some nifty gear you’ve got.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m you,” Conrad told him and delivered a right hook to the man’s temple that took him down.
The radio of the unconscious Haz-Mat technician squawked. The signal was breaking up in the subbasement, but Conrad heard enough to know he needed to get out, and he had known from the beginning he’d never get out the way he got in. Now, he could use the technician’s gear for where he was headed.
As Conrad zipped up his Haz-Mat suit, a Capitol Police officer entered the old furnace area and saw the body on the ground. The CP drew his weapon and ran over. Conrad stood very still, pointing to the man on the ground.
“He was down here doing God knows what,” Conrad said in a muffled voice through his mask.
The CP was bent over the body when he noticed Conrad’s dusty wingtip shoes protruding from his newly donned suit, and quickly drew his pistol.
Conrad blocked the officer’s arm and the gun fired. The sound of the shot inside the old walls was deafening. Conrad stiff-armed him in the neck, knocking him back against an electrical box, then raced for the grating to the network of old gas pipes.
He heard shouts and looked back to see a team of CP officers, rifles at the ready, running toward him, attracted by the sound of gunfire.
Conrad gave the grating a good hard yank and it came free.
The police were firing now and his mask was fogging up in the dark. A bullet ricocheted by Conrad’s ear, sending him to the floor. He popped up again and, on all fours, lunged forward. A moment later he plunged into the steam tunnels.
B
Y THE TIME
M
AX
S
EAVERS ARRIVED
on the scene at the old boiler room in the subbasement, a dozen Capitol Police were crowded around the piping entrance.
“What are you waiting for?” Seavers screamed.
But the Capitol Police officer halted his men and pulled out his radio to speak: “Suspect is in a Haz-Mat uniform and has entered the steam tunnels. Repeat, suspect is in the tunnels.”
Seavers stared at him. “You’re not going after him?”
“We won’t even let our dogs go after him,” the officer said. “Not down there. Too dangerous. All that crumbling concrete and carcinogenic asbestos. And our phones and radios don’t work in the tunnels.”
“This is a national security issue! That terrorist could be planting a suitcase nuke to blow up Capitol Hill!”
“That doesn’t seem to be the case, sir, based on what we’re seeing down here.”
“And what the hell do you know?” Seavers said. “It was a CP officer who staged one of the last false alarms here a couple of years back. You know how they knew it was a CP officer? He was so stupid he couldn’t even correctly spell out his ‘anonymous’ warning note.”
“Easy, sir,” said the CP officer. “The R.A.T.S. are coming.”
“Rats?”
“Recon and Tactics Squad,” the officer said. “A select group of us have undergone special training to access the miles of utility tunnels underneath the Capitol complex. They’re arriving now.”
Seavers turned to see the elite unit march up with their navy blue baseball hats, flak jackets that said R.A.T.S., and special night-vision Haz-Mat masks. The laser-sighted automatic machine guns in particular impressed Seavers, as he instantly recognized them to be German-made G36s by their distinctive translucent magazines. Their short-stroke gas system enabled them to fire tens of thousands of rounds without cleaning, perfect for use in the tunnels. And he especially admired the commanding officer’s AG36 40mm grenade launcher.
“Well, it’s about time,” he said.
The knife-thin commanding officer lowered her mask to reveal a young, dark-skinned face. “I’m Sergeant Randolph, sir.”
“Have you ever done this before?” he demanded.
She ignored him as she unfolded her classified schematics of the steam tunnels and reviewed choke points with her team.
“We won’t have any radio signals down there,” Sergeant Randolph said. “We’ll stick to light signals. Converge at point C.”
Seavers said, “Where is point C?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, folding up her blueprints and slipping them inside a hidden vest pocket. “But the Capitol Police can’t provide any further details about how we protect the tunnels. You know, national security.”
Seavers watched her put on her mask. She motioned a man to widen the open grating and a blast of scalding steam came out. Seavers covered his face and watched Sergeant Randolph and her R.A.T.S. vanish into the pipes.