It had a faintly bitter tang.
Next time I went chasing after bad guys, I’d have to bring a cooler full
of ice and a six-pack.
For a while I conned myself with thoughts of all the eight-foot glassy
waves waiting to be surfed, all the icy beers and the tacos and the
lovemaking with Sasha that lay ahead of me, until the feeling of
oppression and the claustrophobic panic gradually lifted.
I didn’t fully calm down until I was able to summon a mental picture of
Sasha’s face. Her gray eyes as clear as rainwater. Her lush mahogany
hair. The shape of her mouth curved by laughter. Her radiance.
Because I’d been cautious, the kidnapper was surely unaware that I was
present, which meant he would have no reason to conduct his business
without benefit of a lamp. Being unable to see his victim’s terror would
diminish his twisted pleasure. The absolute darkness seemed proof to me
that he was not dangerously close but in another room, shut off from
here but nearby.
The absence of screams must mean that the child had not yet been
touched. To this predator, the pleasure of hearing would be equal to the
pleasure of seeing, in the cries of his victims, he would perceive
music.
If I couldn’t detect the dimmest trace of the lamp by which he worked,
he wouldn’t be able to see mine. I fished the flashlight from under my
belt and switched it on.
I was in an ordinary elevator alcove. To the right and around a corner,
I found a corridor that was quite long and perhaps eight feet wide, with
.
an ash-gray ceramic-tile floor and poured-in-place concrete walls
painted pale, glossy blue. It led in one direction, under the length of
the warehouse that I had recently traversed at ground level.
Not much dust had filtered down to this depth, where the air was as
still and as cool as that in a morgue. The floor was too clean to reveal
footprints.
The fluorescent bulbs and diffusion panels hadn’t been pulled out of the
ceiling. They didn’t pose any danger to me, because power was no longer
supplied to any of these buildings.
On other nights, I had found that the government’s salvage operation had
stripped away items of value from only limited areas of the base.
Perhaps, in the middle of the process, the Department of Defense
accountants had decided that the effort was more expensive than the
liquidation value of the salvaged goods.
To my left, the corridor wall was unbroken. Along the right side lay
rooms waiting behind a series of unpainted, stainless-steel doors
without markings of any kind.
Even though I was currently unable to consult with my clever canine
brother, I was capable of deducing on my own that the slamming of two of
these doors must have produced the crashes that had drawn me down here.
The corridor was so long that my flashlight couldn’t reveal the end of
it. I wasn’t able to see how many rooms it served, whether fewer than
six or more than sixty, but I suspected that the boy and his abductor
were in one of them.
The flashlight was beginning to feel hot in my hand, but I knew the heat
wasn’t real. The beam was not intense, and it was directed away from me,
I was keeping my fingers well back from the bright lens.
Nevertheless, I was so accustomed to avoiding light that, by holding
this source of it too long, I began to feel something of what hapless
Icarus must have felt when, flying too near the sun, he’d detected the
stink of burning feathers.
Instead of a knob, the first door featured a lever, and instead of a
keyhole, there was a slot for the insertion of a magnetic card.
Either the electronic locks would have been disabled when the base was
abandoned or they would have disengaged automatically when the power was
shut off.
I put one ear to the door. There was no sound whatsoever from within.
Gingerly, I pressed down on the lever. At best I expected a thin,
betraying skreek and at worst the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s