Kurt Mason arrived back in Charlotte and entered the house in Fourth Ward.
He went online, clicked his way through the firewalls and into the Knoxville Southeast’s dispatch office to keep an eye on the arrival of M343’s engineer and conductor at the rail yard in Spartanburg.
+ + + +
While I was on my way Uptown, I got word from Ralph: They decided to have the doctors break Brineesha’s water. Clear fluid, a good sign. She was dilated six centimeters. Things were moving forward. They expected the baby sometime in the next few hours. And, while I was relieved, I was also distracted by thinking about what was going on right here, right now, in Charlotte.
I parked, put the items I’d picked up from the university in my pocket, and I was walking over to meet with Ingersoll and his team when a call came in from Angela at Cyber. “It sounds like there’s an echo on that audio from your conversation with Basque,” she said. “Like he might be in a long, narrow room.”
“An echo?”
“It’s faint, but when I enhance the digital signature, I can catch hold of it.”
“Can you analyze the acoustics? Figure out the shape of the room?”
“Not unless I have a baseline of his voice in a known space.”
I thought for a moment. “I spoke with him in April, a Friday—it would have been the eleventh or twelfth—in one of their interrogation rooms there at HQ. Pull up the copy of the audio and the room’s dimensions.”
“Good. I’ll see what I can find out.”
* * *
I convened with Voss, Ingersoll, and two other members of the Hostage Rescue Team in the kitchen of a restaurant just down the block from the intersection where I was going to be meeting with Basque.
While I put on a Kevlar vest, Ingersoll gave me the rundown. “We have three snipers on nearby buildings and four undercover agents—two in nearby restaurants, one dressed as a homeless man, one as a jogger who’ll be stretching out nearby. SWAT’s on call and two ambulances are around the corner, parked one block away. I’ll be across the street in the lobby of a hotel. Stay in radio contact. If you run into any trouble let us know and we will take him out.”
“Understood.”
I zipped up a light Windbreaker to cover the body armor so I could look as inconspicuous as possible.
Recently, for field ops, the Bureau had switched to wireless mics and receiver patches that you wear discreetly behind your ear.
Ingersoll gave me a set of plastic flex cuffs and an automatic knife, and I put them in my pocket.
After I’d tested my radio patch, I stepped outside into the sunlight, and at one fifteen I started down the street toward Independence Square.
My senses seemed sharper than normal. I felt the heat of the sun pricking the back of my neck, smelled the scent of coconut sunscreen as a cluster of giggling junior-high girls passed me on the sidewalk, heard snippets of conversations from people talking on their cell phones as they walked by.
It all became clear, as if life were slowing down, my body preparing me to be more ready than I’d ever been to meet with someone.
As I neared the corner, I could see that it was bustling with people: the lunch crowd finding their way to the nearby restaurants, parents out with their kids heading to one of the city’s parks or museums, some folks just out enjoying the summer Saturday. I counted twenty-nine people in the close vicinity of the intersection.
“What do we have?” Ingersoll asked from the other end of the radio. “Anything? Any visual?”
“Negative,” I said.
Is Basque really going to meet you here?
How is he going to pull that off?
Arriving at the corner, I scanned the people surrounding me for anyone with Basque’s build. He was as tall as I was and muscular, athletic. Even if he were wearing a disguise, he couldn’t have hidden his size.
No one fit the bill.
How did he do that with the cell phone and the Bank of America building? How—
Oh.
An echo.
Yes.
Then I had it, or at least I thought I did.
Yesterday morning when Guido was showing Ralph and me around Charlotte he’d mentioned that for a news special a reporter had walked through the storm-sewer tunnels to show how vulnerable and easily accessible they are. She’d had phone reception most of the way.
No, Basque wasn’t in the building.
He was under it.
I was evaluating that possibility and its implications when a young man locked eyes with me and started toward me. Early twenties, Caucasian, 1970s sideburns. He looked disoriented, in a daze.
“Someone’s coming,” I said into my radio. “Hold positions. Do not move.”
He lurched forward, his steps choppy and uneven.
Is he high? Drunk? Drugged?
I approached him cautiously. “Sir? Are you alright?”
“Are you Patrick?” His voice was as unsteady as his gait.
He knows your name.
Basque sent him.
He had both of his hands in his pockets. I couldn’t tell if he had a weapon.
This was not the time to take unnecessary risks. I drew my gun. “Hands where I can see them. Now.”
As soon as I unholstered my weapon, people gasped, screamed. Began to clear the area.
Maybe that was what Basque wanted.
There was no way to tell.
The young man removed his hands.
His left one was empty. In his right he held a flip phone.
“Hold positions,” I said into my radio.
He extended his hand to me, offering me the phone. “I have a message for you from Richard.”
My heart was hammering. An explosive device? Was this guy a suicide bomber? I tried to decide whether or not to move closer.
He was three meters away.
A trap?
No. Richard contacted you. He wants to meet you.
Maybe he wants to kill you after all.
“Set down the phone,” I said. “Do it slowly, then step away.”
But before he could comply, he went limp and collapsed onto the pavement.
Holstering my weapon, I rushed toward him. Checked his vitals.
He was breathing. Had a pulse. Strong, steady.
I put a hand beneath his neck to support his head.
The phone he’d been holding had dropped when he fell. Now it rang. I snatched it up. “Richard, what did you do?”
“The nearest manhole southwest on Tryon. Open it, go down the ladder. If anyone follows you I won’t give you the antivenom. Lose your radio and your phone. You have five minutes before he dies of respiratory arrest. Go.”
I leapt to my feet and scanned the area for the manhole. “Get an ambulance here now,” I said into the radio.
As the young man gasped for breath, the undercover agents posing as the homeless man and the jogger hastened to assist him. I ran to the manhole, wrestled the cover off, tossed my own cell phone to the side, and ripped off and discarded the radio patch.
I kept the flip phone.
Ingersoll and one of the agents who’d been stationed in the restaurant across the street were racing toward me.
“Cover this hole behind me,” I told them. “Do not follow me or that man will die.”
I scrambled down the ladder and landed in ankle-deep water in the storm-sewer system that, according to what Guido had told us the other day, contained three thousand miles’ worth of tunnels.