Cully Mantooth and Jakob didn’t have the sidewalk to themselves any more, not since Carson Callahan found them. Cully knew Carson, since the archaeologist had picked him up at the airport, but he didn’t know the small, thirty-ish woman with him.
“I hear that the FBI has hired his wife, Faye, to help them with this case,” Cully said. “I know she’s not the only archaeologist in town, because you’re an archaeologist. Why Faye?”
Carson and his friend’s faces fell, and Cully could tell that they both would have happily traded places with Faye.
“I’d love to get that gig, but I guess I didn’t make the cut,” Carson said. “Stacy here isn’t an archaeologist, but she’s a historian and she could have done the job, too, but honestly? Faye’s the one they want. She’s just that good.”
“Cousin Faye’s the biggest expert?” Cully was poking the big man’s ego on purpose. Carson’s response to this question would reveal an awful lot. “Bigger than you and this lady, here?”
“I’m sorry. I should have introduced you. Cully Mantooth, meet Dr. Stacy Wong. When I heard that the FBI had hired Faye for her experience in working with law enforcement, I was disappointed, but I’m not gonna lie. Faye’s good at working with law enforcement. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. She solved the FBI’s case for him, if you want to know the truth of the matter.”
Good for Carson. He had sufficient ego to aim for a Ph.D. and get one, but he could still admit that other people were highly qualified, too. Cully was willing to entertain the possibility that Carson hadn’t bombed his own conference, but he wasn’t ready to trust anybody and he was still in the mood to prod the archaeologist a bit. The historian, too. “Bet you both still wish the agent had picked you.”
Stacy’s face grew sullen and still. She said nothing, but Carson said, “Nobody’s saying much, but we’re both pretty sure they want Faye to check out some underground structures uncovered by the bomb. Oral history says that they’re down there. So if you’re asking if I’d love to tour the legendary underground Chinese city that Stacy’s been bugging me about for years, then yeah. You bet I wish Bigbee had picked me. I’m an archaeologist. I like to go down in holes in the ground, get dirty, and look at old things. Faye’s gonna get to do that, while I sit up here and talk to a movie star. No offense.”
Cully’s face tingled and his vision dimmed. After all he’d been through that morning, was he really going to faint now? Was it really that much of a shock to hear that the bomb had uncovered a place that he’d spent a half-century trying not to remember?
Yes, it was. He remembered the darkness and the cold, and he remembered his last sight of Angela down there. He would give anything to have her back. Failing that, he would give anything to forget her.
“Are you okay, Mr. Mantooth?” Carson’s voice brought him back from that dark place.
Cully covered his distress by clearing his throat, then he asked “What legendary underground Chinese city?” as if his mother hadn’t told him a thousand times about the years she’d lived down there as a child. As if he hadn’t spent the worst night of his life hiding down there.
It knocked him back on his heels a bit to hear Carson mention the damnable place when he’d just been talking about it himself for the first time since the day he lost Angela. Barely a day had passed since he’d been on the plane from LAX to OKC, telling Jakob things about his Oklahoma childhood that he’d never shared in the half-century they’d known each other.
Why had he told Jakob about his mother’s year underground? He’d never even told the man that he was half-Chinese. He supposed he’d been overcome with nostalgia while riding on the plane that would finally take him home after all this time. The only thing he’d kept to himself was that awful night on the run, the one that had started with Angela by his side and ended without her.
Carson was still rambling. Good Lord, this man could talk. He was saying, “I think Stacy’s talked to every old person of Chinese descent in Oklahoma City. She’s a regular at all the nursing homes. To be honest, I can’t make myself believe half of what they’ve told her. They say the place went on for a mile, all the way south to the river, but come on. That seems a little over-the-top. Still, we do know that it was real. The newspaper published pictures in the sixties, and we have health department records. Now that the bomber’s opened the place up, I’d like to see it.”
Most people with Cully’s family ties would respond to this by asking Carson why he couldn’t believe the stories of old people without documents to back them up. Was it because those old people weren’t white? He thought about telling his mother’s story and daring Carson to call her a liar.
But he wasn’t being fair. Carson was Creek himself, despite his wavy blonde hair, and Cully could see that he meant no harm. Nevertheless, Cully was raised by a woman who taught him to keep his stories to himself. He just smiled and nodded. Stacy and Carson never knew that they could have collected a fascinating oral history from an old person of Chinese descent then and there, if they’d only asked.
Except for the part of his history that involved Angela. Cully was resolved that her name would never pass his lips again.
* * *
Faye was ankle-deep in river water. Or was it really river water? She was standing at the point where a large concrete pipe discharged water into a concrete ditch that took it to the Oklahoma River. According to Ahua, this pipe was a major outfall for the city’s stormwater drainage system. When rain fell on pancake-flat Oklahoma City and people’s houses didn’t flood, it was because a system of drains shunted the rainwater here.
In other words, she was wading in water that had been really clean when it fell from the sky. Since then, though, it had rinsed the streets and sidewalks of a major city’s business district and carried away the excess lawn fertilizer from the neighborhoods that surrounded it. This made her really grateful for her hip waders.
She stood between Ahua and Liu, who were each wearing their own hip waders. A man named Agent Goldsby, who said he was with the Evidence Response Team, was briefing them on their upcoming journey under Oklahoma City. Beside him stood Patricia Kura, who introduced herself as an engineer with Oklahoma City’s Department of Public Works.
Ms. Kura had unrolled a series of blueprints and spread them across the hood of the vehicle that had brought them to this spot. Her explanation helped Faye to form a mental image of what they were about to do.
“We’re starting here, at the outfall that drains rainwater from downtown Oklahoma City into the river. We can easily walk into the pipes that bring that water here. They’ll get narrower, but we should still be able to get through to the spot where Agent Ahua wants to go. If our as-built drawings are accurate, this will work. But when you’re dealing with a system this old, you can’t always count on the drawings reflecting reality. Understand?”
They had all nodded, then Ahua had pulled Faye, Liu, and Goldsby aside for a briefing on new evidence.
Goldsby had chimed in with a report from his Evidence Response Team. “We’ve only partially cleared the stairs beneath the Gershwin. We’ve tracked footprints to the bottom of the stairs, where there’s a landing and two doorways, one to the left and one straight ahead. There are only a few footprints on the stairs and the landing, but they match the bomber’s shoes, so we know that he got that far. There’s no sign that he went through the door on the left. Everything on the lower level is covered with a heavy layer of undisturbed dust, so we’re pretty sure about that. The other door opens into a small room. Based on his tracks in the dust, we know that he opened the door, walked a few steps into the room, turned around, and came back out, shutting the door again.”
“Then he walked back up the stairs and detonated the bomb?” Faye asked.
“Exactly right.”
Faye had waited for him to explain how this story related to the fact that she was wearing hip waders. He did not. She had also wondered why the Assistant Special Agent in Charge was devoting a precious hour to this underground adventure. She doubted that he made a habit of donning hip waders.
“We think the room that he entered is key, but we’re hamstrung on getting in there and looking around until Goldsby and his people finish gathering evidence,” Ahua said. “Because of the dust, we’re pretty sure that the bomber is the first person to go through that door in many years. So our question is this: Why? Actually, why did he go downstairs at all if he wasn’t trying to blow apart a building’s foundation?”
“Was it an elaborate suicide scheme?” Faye asked.
“We don’t think so,” Ahua continued. “The bomb was made to detonate remotely. Either he meant to leave it down there and detonate it once he was top-side, which begs the question of ‘Why?’ because there was nobody down there to hurt and we don’t know of anything that he might want to destroy. Or he meant to detonate it in the Gershwin’s lobby, only without blowing himself to bits. Again, we have to ask ‘Why?’ There was no obvious target there.”
Faye thought that there was one obvious possibility. “Was the bomb stored down in the room he entered?”
“Good thought, but no. If he or an accomplice had hidden something down there, more than one set of tracks would have been obvious in the dust, but that’s not the case. There’s just one set of tracks, recent ones. They head into the room, turn around, and leave. We think that room is important in some way, so Goldsby’s group expects to be working in there for days, trying to figure out why.”
“How does that relate to all this?” Faye gestured at the massive concrete pipe, the river, the agents beside her, and her hip waders.
Goldsby, the only one who had been to the bottom of the stairs, had the answer. “When you stand in the doorway to that room, you smell water. You hear running water. And you can see a metal door, maybe two feet across, high on the far wall. We compared notes with the city’s public works engineers, and they’re pretty sure that metal door opens into a storm sewer pipe.”
This explained the presence of Patricia Kura.
“Well, it’s certainly not a regular sewer pipe, carrying regular old sewage,” Ahua said. “You’d know by the smell.”
“Exactly,” Goldsby said. “Stormwater is just rainwater diverted from the streets and sent to the river. You wouldn’t want to drink it, but it doesn’t smell like sewage. We want to know for sure what’s on the other side of that door, and we don’t want to wait until the Evidence Response Team has worked its way across the floor, millimeter by millimeter. Hence this trip through a wet pipe.”
Finally, an explanation for the hip waders.
“And also,” Ahua said, “the walls of that room are more interesting than usual. If we can access it from the metal door, we can get a good vantage point for viewing the parts of the walls that are hard to see from where we’re currently working, without—oh, I don’t know, flying in a drone or using a humongous selfie stick. If I crashed a drone in Goldsby’s crime scene, I’d be dead and he’d be looking at a murder charge.”
Goldsby laughed, but that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t kill Ahua for mucking up his crime scene.
“What’s so interesting about the walls?” Faye asked, wondering whether Ahua was telling everything he knew about that room. Nothing that he’d said explained why someone of his rank had assigned himself to the menial task of crawling through sewers. And nothing that he’d said explained the new darkness in his eyes and the new heaviness in his step.
Ahua had looked like this ever since he got the text that prompted this underground junket. When a case took a turn that burdened an experienced FBI agent to this extent, it had to be a bad turn. Faye was worried.
Goldsby held out his phone. The photo on its screen was painfully colorful. It showed walls covered with floor-to-ceiling murals—trees, vines, and faces. Many faces.
“This is why I wanted to bring you with us, Faye,” Ahua said. “Those paintings look recent to me. Well, not yesterday-recent, but I don’t think they’ve been there since before World War II, which is when people were living down there. I know it’s not your specialty, but I thought you might be able to give us an idea of their age. I’d also really like to know when that door was cut into the storm drain. And why.”
With that, he had beckoned to Ms. Kura and they had walked to the storm sewer outfall and stepped into ankle-deep water.
* * *
Goldsby led the way into the darkness, followed by Ahua. Faye walked behind them, then the public works engineer, Ms. Kura. Liu brought up the rear. The concrete pipe arched over their heads and the murky water splashed at their ankles.
“Ms. Kura knows the design of these sewers backwards and forwards. She’s going to help us stay safe while we’re down here.”
The city engineer spoke up. “Call me Patricia, please. Before we go any farther, let me remind you of something. We’ve got to be especially careful from the get-go, because we might find animals living in the stretches of pipe closest to the surface. People, too, actually. That’s more common than you’d think.”
Ahua nodded. “Yes, and that’s not good. You have to remember that these things aren’t just designed to catch rainwater. They’re designed to catch all the rainwater. There was a family living near here who thought the storm drain would make a good tornado shelter. They’re dead now.”
Faye felt a very slight current tugging at her ankles. On a day like today, with its zero percent chance of rain, it was hard to imagine the deadly torrent that would come during a rainstorm.
They were making good time, so she guessed that they were far enough into the pipe to be clear of predators, animal or human. There was no hint of sunlight left, either direct or reflected. They were dependent on the headlamps attached to their safety helmets. Still, Faye was comforted to know that Liu, who was nearly twice her weight and heavily armed, had her back.
Goldsby, by contrast, scared her a little. She was pretty sure that if she mistakenly messed up an important piece of evidence, he would beat her with it.
Patricia didn’t seem scary, but she too might turn vengeful if Faye hurt her storm sewers.
Ahua had given Faye a recorder to use for her narration of their expedition. “We’re walking through a large pipe, apparently recent and well-preserved,” she said as she walked.
The five continued to walk along a pipe that slanted ever-so-slightly upward under their feet. She resumed recording. “We just passed a spot where two lateral lines entered this pipe, one on each side. Shortly after that, the main pipe took a left turn.”
“Uh-oh,” Goldsby said, and she didn’t like the sound of it.
He seemed to be responding to a narrowing of the pipe. They had expected this, but it was still disconcerting. It wasn’t like the new diameter was tiny. Faye, Patricia, and Ahua could still walk upright, but Goldsby and Liu now had to stoop a bit.
“We’ll see the diameter decrease at least a couple more times before we get where we’re going,” Patricia said. “Once we get past that point, it’s hard to be sure. For one thing, the river has been re-routed several times since the old part of this system was built.”
Faye took some deep breaths to calm herself. She was only a little claustrophobic—and in the end weren’t most people?—so she could generally get past it enough to do what she needed to do. Still, traveling for a mile in an ever-narrowing corridor was making her pulse race. Observing and recording were both calming activities, so she went back to talking to the recorder.
“Here’s another pair of lateral lines bringing water into this main line. They’re smaller than the pipe where I’m standing, but I could get through them on my hands and knees, if I had to. I’d rather not have to, though.”
On cue, the concrete walls around her closed in a little bit more. Technically, she could still walk upright, but the concrete was snagging on her hair and brushing against her sleeves.
“There’s a teeny bit of good news,” she continued. “The water’s getting shallower upstream of those lateral lines. They were each bringing in more water. It barely splashes as I walk through it.”
Patricia interrupted her to say, “Would you look at that?” The others gathered behind her to add the light of their head lamps to hers.
In front of them, the pipe changed dramatically. It narrowed again, and it changed color and texture. They were stepping from a modern-looking concrete pipe into a very old storm sewer line, constructed of brick. Even its shape changed into something odd and unfamiliar. This sewer pipe wasn’t round. It was wider at the top than at the bottom. Faye didn’t know the technical term for this kind of pipe, but she would have said it was teardrop-shaped, only the teardrop was upside down.
“This is old,” Liu said. “Do you think it might date to the period when people were still living underground, Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth?”
Thrilled for her expertise to finally be useful, Faye said, “Very possibly. I’d say this brickwork looks a lot like the brickwork in the photo of the staircase underneath the Gershwin Hotel.”
They all mumbled their agreement as they checked out the soft red clay bricks set in aging mortar. Then they ducked their heads and stepped into the odd old teardrop-shaped pipe.
Faye reached a hand up and dragged her fingers over the rough bricks above her. This kept her from bumping her head and it helped her remember which way was up in dark, strange surroundings that were thoroughly disorienting.
It was hard to gauge distance as her fingers bumped over the bricks, but she judged that she’d traveled the equivalent of eight or ten city blocks away from the river when Goldsby stopped again. His headlight illuminated something rectangular that had a metallic glint. It was set into the bricks at about shoulder height.
Goldsby let out a low whistle. “That’s it. That’s the door into the room with the murals. It has to be. It’s the right size and shape, and it’s right where the city’s engineers said it would be. And, just like they said, the pipe’s still big enough that all four of us squeezed through.” He checked the pedometer on his phone. “We’ve walked almost a mile, also just like they said.”
Patricia took a small bow. “You sound like you didn’t believe us,” she said.
“Our people took laser measurements of the staircase and the chamber at the bottom of it and your engineers overlaid that data onto your maps,” Goldsby said. “You’re all very good at what you do. I’m not surprised.”
“Now we’ve got to get that thing open,” Liu said. “If God is good, there will be a handle on this side and it won’t be locked.”
God was indeed good. The five of them crowded behind Goldsby as he carefully photographed the door before turning the handle with his gloved hands. It operated a latch that screeched loud enough to make Faye worry that dust, rust, and time had left it useless.
Goldsby banged on the handle with the heel of his hand and tried again. Then he did it again. And again.
Finally, the sound of metal on metal echoed off the bricks surrounding them. Its squeal hurt Faye’s ears, but when the piercing sound faded, the door was open.
Squeezing behind Goldsby so that she could look over his shoulder, she saw a room that was unmistakably the one that he had shown Faye on his phone screen. The Evidence Response Team had set up lights in the room’s doorway, illuminating the windowless space. After walking a mile in darkness that was only punctured by their headlamps, the chamber was bright enough to hurt her eyes.
It wasn’t large, perhaps fifteen feet square. Every square inch of its walls and ceiling was painted in eye-poppingly bright colors, brimming with life. It reminded her of prehistoric cave art, even to the bold red handprints that served as a recurring motif.
Scattered through the painted faces and flowers were the symbols of many of the world’s religions. Faye saw a cross, a Star of David, and the smiling face of the Buddha. Here and there, she saw Arabic calligraphy that she presumed was associated with Islam. Among the religious symbols, she saw the faces of happy people—men, women, and children. And snaking through it all was more calligraphy, this time in English, saying over and over again, “Evil must be obliterated.”
Faye, Patricia, and two of the FBI agents jostled each other for space, all of them trying to get a look, but Ahua hung back while they each took a turn.
“Hey, guys. Look up,” Patricia said. “Is that electrical conduit pipe? Surely they didn’t have—”
“You don’t think they had electricity down here?” Liu’s voice emanated from the darkness behind her. Faye stepped aside to let her see. “Of course they had electricity. At least they had it as soon as Oklahoma City got it, around the turn of the twentieth century. My grandmother said that they had electric lights when she worked down here, for sure. A Buddhist temple, too, and gambling halls. They even had rooms where they grew sprouts and mushrooms for their above-ground restaurants.”
“Seriously?” Goldsby said, but Faye didn’t feel as doubtful as he sounded. It had been a long time since she’d been in a place that was so far outside her everyday experience. She had the sense that anything could happen here.
This feeling extended into the past. Faye had the sense that this was a place where anything could have happened and probably did.
“Didn’t you notice the overhead pipes in that picture of the oil stove?” Faye asked him.
“I didn’t,” Goldsby said, and he sounded embarrassed.
“Looked like electrical conduit to me, and maybe even water pipes, and they looked just like those.” Liu squeezed an arm past him and pointed at the chamber’s ceiling. “Look around you. Everything’s still in good shape. The people who built this were smart enough to figure out how to do things. I bet they tapped into the power lines of people who never even knew they were paying for somebody else’s lights.”
Faye was haunted by the people who cut the hole she was peering through. She stepped back to give Patricia some space and looked at its metal-rimmed frame, designed to keep water out. The fact that real, live human beings made the fantastical choice to move underground said a lot about how bad life was for them on the surface. Faye was sort of glad to think that they’d stolen electricity from their oppressors. And this door had solved another big problem for them.
Agent Liu kept talking, happy to reminisce about her grandmother’s stories while they stared at the bizarre chamber. “All those things—temple, laundries, mushroom farms, and all—were on the level right under the street. Which, I guess, is where we are now. Storm sewers are pretty close to the surface, right?”
“Makes sense to me,” Ahua said. “But are you saying there were other levels?”
“Yep,” Liu said. “The second level down was supposed to be mostly sleeping rooms. On the third level down—”
“Oh, come on,” Ahua said. “You’re not going to tell me that they dug three levels below the ground. I never doubted that they did something like what we see here, not after I saw those photos in the paper when I was a kid—”
“You certainly can’t doubt that now. You just saw it.”
He actually hadn’t, because he had yet to take his turn at the door.
“Yeah, but three levels?”
“Not everywhere,” Liu said. “But my grandmother said there was a third level down, smaller than the rest, and that’s where the cemetery was. And another temple.”
“Get outta town,” Faye said, hoping that her recorder had caught everything Liu had said.
“Everybody says that when the health inspectors came down here in 1921 for a surprise inspection, it wasn’t much of a surprise. Everywhere they went, people knew they were coming before they got there. The stories all agree that they didn’t have telephones down here. So how did word go ahead of them like that?”
“Walkie-talkies?” Patricia’s joking tone was doing a lot to distract Faye from thinking about how many tons of dirt were over their heads.
“Very funny,” Liu said. “The inspectors believed there were ladders between levels, and my grandmother said that they were right. According to her, while the health department people were inspecting one room, somebody went downstairs and hurried to get ahead of the inspectors—”
“Like chipmunks?” Patricia asked, still checking out the murals.
“Yes, like chipmunks, if you want to be snarky. They’d pop up like chipmunks and warn their neighbors to be ready because the inspectors were coming. That theory argues for more than one level belowground.”
“Or they could’ve gone upstairs and run ahead to another surface access point,” Ahua said. Liu’s snort said that she was finished arguing with nonbelievers.
Faye resumed her conversation with the recorder. “Every inch of the walls is painted with scenes of people interacting with nature. They’re climbing trees, swimming, tending gardens, and sharing meals. There are also a lot of religious symbols. The scenes are divided by tree trunks and ivy vines. The floor is painted to resemble grass. The ceiling is sky blue and dotted with clouds. Somebody spent a lot of time down here with a paintbrush.”
“Do you think those paintings were done eighty or a hundred years ago, while people were still living down here?”
She paused the phone’s recorder to answer Ahua. “Gut feeling? No. They look too recent. To confirm that, I’d recommend taking some paint samples and sending them to a lab.”
Ahua nodded and typed a note on his phone.
“It should be possible to tell whether the paints are modern,” she said. “If there are multiple layers of paint, the bottom one would give you an idea of when the room was built. Or first painted. Even if the murals are recent, it doesn’t mean that they were painted when the room was new. I don’t think they were, because everything but the paint looks really old.”
Goldsby said, “Good plan. I’ll make sure we get paint samples to a lab. We’ll take brick and mortar samples, too. And wood samples from the door. Now, step up and take a better look. Give me the archaeologist’s perspective. It’s incredibly useful.”
It took Faye’s eyes a moment to fully adjust to the well-lit room and the brilliant colors on its walls. A few moments passed before she noticed that the room wasn’t completely empty. Crude wooden benches were pushed against the three walls that she could see, giving the space the feel of an auditorium, lecture hall, or church. Even the benches were painted with bright, busy images that were like camouflage. The benches blended so completely into the walls that they were hardly noticeable, and so were the objects resting on them.
When she made the effort to focus on the benches, their straight lines took her eyes straight across the room from right to left, leading them to the only unpainted things in sight. Three cream-colored bundles rested on the benches that met in the left corner of the room.
When Faye finally saw them, she heard the words “Oh no oh no those can’t be real” leave her in a single breath.
But she knew they were real, even though blankets covered the children’s faces. Anyone who had ever swaddled a baby would know that these were real. One of the bodies was wrapped a bit less tightly, allowing a few locks of dark hair to escape. Those curls broke her heart.
Faye stood there, trapped by the bodies of her companions, unable to step away and only able to look at the small, shrouded bodies. She had to resist the urge to crawl through the small opening and stumble across the room, folding the blankets back gently to reveal the faces of three young children. The FBI would have something to say about her ruining their crime scene, though, so she couldn’t hold the small bodies in her arms. She couldn’t tell them how sorry she was that someone had put them down and walked away.
“Who would do this?”
Faye heard the four words hanging in the air, then she realized that she had spoken them herself. She pointed at the bodies, because she’d said all the words that she could manage.
Goldsby squeezed past her for a look, then backed away, shaking his head and silent. Liu did the same and had the same reaction.
Ahua finally stepped forward to peer into the strange room. The look on his face told Faye that he had known all along that the children were here. Their bodies were the reason that a Special Agent in Charge had made the long slog from the river.
“You already knew,” she said. “Somebody on the Evidence Response Team leaned into the room, looked hard to the right, and saw something awful.”
Goldsby turned toward Ahua and said, “Is that true? One of my people saw this and told you?”
Ahua said only, “Affirmative. And then I sent a team to do exactly what we just did, only they were also sweeping for bombs. When they texted to say that there really were three dead children down here, I organized this party and now here we are.”
In the moment that the Evidence Response Team saw the bundles and realized what they were, Ahua’s investigation had become something more than an attempt to discern the motives of a bomber who was dead and gone and who was presumably working alone. It also became the investigation of a very cold case involving the deaths of three small children.
Ahua stood looking into the painted chamber for a long moment. Finally, he was able to speak. “I have no idea who left those little bodies here. If they’re still alive, I want them in prison for the rest of their miserable lives.”
So did Faye. She had begun the day scared and angry. Being given a chance to help find the man who had tried to kill her and everyone else in the Gershwin Hotel had felt cathartic. It had been a way to resolve that anger. But now?
Now her anger had ripened into the kind of rage that powered holy wars. She, too, wanted the person—people?—who had done this to rot in prison until they died.