Ultimate Weapon (McClouds & Friends #6)(140)

Whereas Val himself had been forced to drive like a maniac to the Roma airport at Fiumicino and abandon the rental car in the taxi lane, door hanging open, keys in the ignition. He’d sprinted up to the ticketing area, waiting on line after line, trying desperately to find a seat on a commercial flight.

He was spoiled, by all the high budget shortcuts of PSS and the obscenely rich corporations and military operations that they serviced. Cristo, how did normal people survive the nightmarish frustration?

Normal people didn’t usually have their lovers chained under a torturer’s knife.

One last wrench, one last blaze of agony to take his mind off his troubles, and the grate came loose from the mouth of the sewer pipe. Thud, clang, and it rolled into the water with a sullen splash.

He clutched the flashlight in his teeth and scooped out armfuls of trash, twigs, leaves and sludge that had drifted down with the rainwater overflow for decades. It had lodged against the grate into a sludgy wall, making the opening too small for a man to crawl through.

He wished he had a team, but it took time to coordinate a team. The McClouds were fierce and competent and well meaning, but they were hours behind him, having to cross two continents and an ocean. He could not hope for help from them. By the time they followed their beacons to the source, whatever was going to happen would have long since happened. So be it.

He tightened his teeth on the pen flashlight and launched himself headfirst into the dark, wet hole. It was like crawling into his own grave.

Which did not bother him. He was not afraid of death. It was life without her that he could not face. The blankness of it, the dull, flat emptiness that he had mistaken for calm. Detachment.

Cold, slimy mud squelched between his fingers. He should have thought of rubber gloves, but he’d been too frantic to do more than procure the most basic things that occurred to him: backpack, boat, crowbar, welding gear, guns, ammunition. His black clothing was now covered with stinking mud. At least he wasn’t immersed in icy water. But then again, the evening was still young.

A couple hundred meters brought him to the main tunnel, a larger and still older one. Here he no longer had to crawl but only crouch, doubled over. He started to run, splashing through the dripping tunnel, the flashlight bobbing wildly between his teeth.

The tunnel was long, with various forks and twists. Overflow from old rainwater cisterns at several points on the estate all found their way here, and he had to dig into his ironclad long-term memory, concentrate and count to remember which one led where he meant to go. He gave thanks for Imre’s rigorous training.

He crawled, face first, through the last hundred meters of the overflow pipe. He barely fit inside it. His shoulders had not been quite as broad the last time he’d crawled through, years ago.

The space before him suddenly opened up into a black void. He stuck his head carefully out and peered up. The cistern had been out of use for a hundred and fifty years or so, the area above ground having been turned into a conservatory at some point in the middle of the nineteenth century. The greenhouse above remained, but in Val’s time of servitude, it had been abandoned, used largely as a storage room and weapons dump. Gabor Novak was not a man with any interest in nurturing life, be it animal or vegetable.

But the conservatory was inside the security perimeter.

The overflow hole was in the narrow upper shaft of the well. Three meters above his head had been the opening. Val had remembered there being a little light inside the well, shining down from the pattern of holes drilled in the iron plate covering the access.

He could barely make out those little holes. The fading light of evening did not penetrate them. Beneath him, the narrow tube of stonework yawned out wide into the huge antique rainwater cistern. Ten, twelve meters deep. Falling into it would be a very bad, slow, lonely death if one did not have the luck to break one’s neck outright.

He groped on the wall in the darkness for the corroded iron ladder steps bolted to the wall, hoping that whatever lay over the iron plate would not be too heavy for him to lift. Hoping that Tamar was still—

No. Straight ahead. Move.

He gritted his teeth around the flashlight, wriggled his upper body out even further, and reached for the first rung.

It snapped off the wall. In his wild flailing for purchase, the flashlight slid from his mouth. He clutched the far side of the wall with his shaking, rigid fingers, legs splayed in the overflow tube, the hand with the throbbing shoulder groping desperately for another rung. A part of his brain that was cool and detached counted the many, many seconds that passed. The iron rung, plop. The flashlight, plop.

So. There was water in the cistern. Who knew how much or from what source. Perhaps it would be drowning for him, rather than a broken neck. No matter. He had no preference.

He reached, clasped the next rung. He would have to pull his entire upper body out of the overflow hole to test this one. There would be no way to keep from falling if this one gave out. He had no reason to think it would be any stronger than the one beneath it.

He had even less reason to turn around and go back.

He realized, bemused, that he was muttering something under his breath. An old prayer he had learned from his grandmother in his early childhood in Romania, before his mother had gotten bored with the man Val had known as his father, and their tiny rural village, and run off with her fancy city boyfriend to Budapest. Taking her luckless little boy with her.

The prayer was in a dialect he barely remembered. Something he’d recited at bedtime, verses to ward off monsters, beasts, vampires.