World of Trouble (The Last Policeman #3)(8)

The relevant experts, in general, have been politely skeptical of such enterprises—of all the governments, the neighborhoods, the millions of private citizens digging into their Cold War–style redoubts. As if one could ever dig deep enough to withstand the blast. As if you could take enough groceries down there with you to survive when the sun disappears and the animals all die.

“Son of a bitch,” mutters Cortez. He’s using my magnifying glass, peering, tapping the smooth stone floor with his big knuckles.

“What?” I say, and then erupt in a coughing fit, overcome by excitement, anxiety, exhaustion, dust. I don’t know what. My throat burns. I’m standing right behind him, peering over his shoulder, shifting on my feet. Time is passing while we stand here, minutes are rushing past like stars flying by at light speed in a science-fiction serial. I check the time on my Casio. It’s 9:45 already. Can that be right?

“Cortez,” I say. “Can you open the door or not?”

“It’s not a door,” he says, sweating, pushing his thick black hair out of his eyes. “That’s the problem.”

“What do you mean, it’s not a door?” I’m speaking too rapidly, too loudly. My words jangle back at me. I feel like I’m going crazy, just a little bit. “You said it was a door.”

“Mea culpa. A door has a handle.” He jabs his finger at the floor. “This is a lid. A cover. There is an opening in the ground here, probably for a staircase, and somebody covered it over.”

Cortez points to four places on the floor where he claims to see the ghostly remnants of post holes, the foundations of a stair rail. But even more telling, he says, are the four panels of the concrete itself: two dark and two light, laid more recently than all the others.

“That’s the lid,” he says. “Those four pieces are one piece. They had a hand mixer, they poured a slab, they stamped and stained it to match the pattern of the floor and cut the edges to fit, and then they lowered it in.” He hands me back my magnifying glass. “You see where it’s cut?”

I can’t, though. I can’t see any of this. I just see a floor. Cortez stands and cracks his back, turning all the way this way, then all the way the other. “The pattern was hand-corrected along the edges. The rest is machine-sawed. This here is done by hand. See?”

I squint at the floor; I open my eyes as wide as they can go. I’m so tired. Cortez sighs with weary amusement and then hustles over to the big garage door.

“Here,” he says, and pops the lock and flies it open. “You see that?”

And the room is suddenly alive with tiny particles, all around, millions of tiny pieces dancing in the empty air.

“Dust.”

“Yes indeedy. Concrete is just tiny stones packed very tight. Someone uses a chop saw or a walk-behind to correct the edges of a lid, for example, and it makes a lot of dust. Like this.”

“When?” I say. “When did they do it?”

“You’re going to hyperventilate, Policeman. Your head is going to fall off.”

“When was it?”

“Might have been yesterday. Might have been a week ago. Like I said—concrete makes a lot of dust.”

I squat down. I get up. I reach into my pocket, feel the photo of Nico, the fork, the cigarette butt now encased in a sandwich baggie. I squat again. My body refuses to be still. I feel coffee sluicing through me, bubbling black and nervous along my veins. The dust is stinging my eyes. I think I can see it now, the hairline fracture between the door and the floor. Nico is down there. Nico and the rest of them. She and her cadre arrived here and have built themselves some sort of ersatz headquarters, under a layer of smoothed rock in an old garage. Waiting down there for the next stage of the scheme to unfold—or have they given up, are they waiting now like ostriches, heads in the dirt below the station?

“Let’s put a handle on it,” I say to Cortez. “Lift it up.”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would require strength, which we do not have.”

I look down at my body. I have always been a thin man, and now I am a thin man after a month of granola bars and coffee. Cortez’s weight loss has resolved his fighter’s frame to a coil of sinew, but he’s hardly Mr. Universe—stronger than me, in other words, but not strong.

“A handle doesn’t help,” he says. He is slowly rolling a cigarette of his own, layering in tobacco from a pouch he keeps in the golf bag.

“So what do we do?” I say, and he laughs, watching me pace.

“I’m thinking, man. I’m pondering. You keep walking in circles. Eventually you will fall over, and that will be amusing.”

I do it. He is joking, teasing me, but I do, I keep walking, I can’t stop, I circle the lid in the floor like an orbiting star. My thoughts run back to my sister’s close compatriot, the one I tried to track down in Concord: Jordan, last name unknown. Jordan was introduced to me by Nico at the University of New Hampshire, when she went there with me to help on a case; he held, she suggested, some vague but critical position in the hierarchy of her conspiracy. What struck me about Jordan was the ironic overlay in everything he said. While Nico’s relationship with their secret revolution was always so earnest—they really were going to save the world—with this kid Jordan I always got a sense that he was playacting, posing, having a grand old time. Nico didn’t see, or didn’t want to see, this attitude in him, and their relationship therefore was just one more thing to make me uneasy. The last time I saw Jordan, Nico was already gone, a helicopter had borne her away, and he gleefully hinted to me about more secrets, deeper levels, aspects of their intrigues to which Nico was not privy.