Faye opened the door of the lean-to where Cully had disappeared and looked into a darkness that didn’t surprise her. The lean-to concealed a stairway leading down, just as she had known that it would.
Of course it did. Cully had said that his mother lived underground as a child. It only made sense that she would have told him how to get down there.
The narrow brick staircase looked as old as the one uncovered by the bomb. Cully was nowhere to be seen. More importantly, the beam of his flashlight was nowhere to be seen. There was nothing but darkness at the foot of the stairs. Maybe he’d moved further into the underground warren and hadn’t seen her open this door, flooding the upper half of the stairwell with light. She had no way to know.
Sunshine lit each stair tread, inviting her to explore. Unfortunately, the sunlight could only penetrate so far. By the time she reached the bottom step, she would be in utter darkness.
Stepping into the unknown would be so tempting, and so stupid. Faye took a step back from the open door and reached for the phone in her pocket so that she could text Ahua about what she’d found.
Before her fingers closed on the phone, she heard the sound of a clicking latch behind her. She turned to see Cully coming out of an abandoned building. How stupid of her not to realize that if Cully knew one secret way to get in and out of his mother’s old home, then he probably knew two.
On his back was a pack and in his hand was a gun. If he’d been wearing a cowboy hat and boots, he could have walked out of one of the old Western movies that her Mamaw had loved. Faye didn’t know if he looked comfortable holding a gun because he knew how to use it or because he’d been acting like he knew how to use it for years and years. Or maybe he had spent the past two days acting like a kindly old gentleman. Was anything in an actor’s world real?
“Give me the phone, Faye. There’s no reason to let the rest of the world know about this place. They’d only mess it up, like they mess up everything.”
“Would you really hurt me, Cully?”
“I just want a chance to explain things to you.”
“You need a gun to do that?”
He looked flustered. “Please. Let’s not have this conversation up here where someone might hear us. Come downstairs with me and I’ll tell you everything.”
Faye looked around. There was no one else in the alley. Who would hear this conversation that he wanted to have? More to the point, who would hear her if she screamed?
Faye was not stupid. She knew how foolish it would be to let a man with a gun lead her to a place where he could shoot her with a reasonable hope that her body might never be found. She knew she must be in shock, because she started to give him a rational explanation of why she didn’t want to do this, but he interrupted her as he was taking her phone out of her hand.
“Please, Faye. Just listen to me. I think I know how to find Stacy, but I will not let you go until you understand how important it is that you keep my secret. Secrets, actually.”
“Will you put down the gun?”
“When we’re downstairs.”
* * *
Joe had gone beyond searching the places where hotel guests were supposed to be. He’d explored the lobbies, the meeting rooms, the stairwells, and the restaurants of both towers. Now he was going to look in places where the guests weren’t supposed to be. He figured he’d start with the laundry.
* * *
When Faye reached the bottom step, she paused. Cully was behind her, a gun in one hand. With the other, he used his flashlight to illuminate the steps as he followed her. There was no other light to illuminate the space. Some prehistoric corner of her brain remembered the sound and feel of a cave, and it used the echoes of his footsteps to give her a sense of the chamber’s substantial size. This room was big, much bigger than the painted room. When she reached the bottom, she stepped out into something that she knew intuitively was a place where people had lived. In the darkness, she felt like she was stepping out into nothing.
Cully joined her in the nothingness. Still standing just behind her, almost close enough to touch his rib cage to her spine, Cully swung the flashlight’s beam around to illuminate the room’s walls. The narrow beam only lit a few square feet at a time, making a spot of brightness that was painful to her dark-adapted eyes.
She guessed that the side walls were ten feet away from her on both sides with the wall in front of her being much farther away than that. As the light slipped down the long wall to her right, it revealed a scene that correlated precisely with all of the eyewitness accounts of the underground community. One open doorway after another pierced the wall. Presuming those eyewitness accounts were correct—and why shouldn’t they be when they’d been right about everything so far?—the doorways marked the entrances of the small sleeping rooms where entire families had passed their nights. Cully raked the light over the wall to her left, and it looked identical to the one on the right, door after door after door.
At the far end of the room, the light beam made a bright circle on the far wall. The wall looked like a blank white-plastered rectangle with a closed door in its very center. Cully flicked his wrist upward and the flashlight lit metallic conduit pipe running down the center of the ceiling. The pipe served three empty light receptacles. Then he flicked his wrist down and she saw a heavy layer of dust, scuffed in the middle by a long row of footprints.
“Have you been down here?” Faye asked.
“Not since 1962.”
“Then somebody else has been, recently. And more than once.”
Cully took a step forward. Since Faye was still in front of him, she reflexively did the same. She supposed she could balk and refuse to walk in the direction he wanted to go, but he did still have a gun.
“I thought you were going to put that thing away when we got down here.”
“You’re in no danger from me, Faye. This gun isn’t for you. It’s for the person who took Stacy.”
“Where do you think she is?”
He used the gun to point to the door in the middle of the big room’s far wall.
“Probably that way. But I want to check every last one of the sleeping chambers opening into this room, just in case.”
* * *
In a stroke of luck, Joe bumped into Agent Ahua on the sidewalk in front of the South Tower. He’d been afraid that the agent was holed up in his command center where civilians might not be allowed to go.
He got straight to the point. “Have you seen Faye?”
Ahua stopped to think. “I’ve seen her since lunch but not lately. You checked your hotel room?”
“Yep. And most every place in the Annex, inside and outside.”
To Joe’s relief, Ahua didn’t blow him off. Or maybe not to Joe’s relief. As he thought of it, he would prefer for an FBI agent to tell him that there was nothing to worry about and his wife was perfectly safe.
Instead, Ahua said, “Stacy just dropped out of sight this morning. If Faye has disappeared, too, I’m concerned.”
Great. Now Joe had confirmation that he needed to be worrying. This was just as well, because he already was. “Can you ask your people to look for her?”
“Yes, and I have a lot of them. I’ll start by ordering a search of the grounds of the Tower Annex. If she’s here, my people will find her quickly. If she’s not, I’ll expand the search.”
As he spoke, Joe saw Jakob hustling in their direction, traveling quickly for a man of his age and size. Before he had even reached them, he called out, “Have either of you seen Cully?”
Ahua met Joe’s eyes. Joe saw frustration there. Maybe even fear, if FBI agents can be said to show fear. Ahua turned to Jakob and said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know where your friend is.”
Then, maybe to Joe and maybe to himself, he said, “Too many people are missing. Or maybe they’re just hiding from their friends and family. I don’t know. But I do know that three missing people is three too many.”
Jakob’s eyes stayed on Ahua’s for just a second too long, like a man who was counting to three.
Stacy.
Cully.
His eyes flicked back toward Joe, and it was as if he’d said his thoughts out loud. Oh, crap. Faye’s missing, too. He’d moved close enough to reach out and grab Joe’s hand. The way he squeezed it made Joe simultaneously feel comforted and wish for his dad.
Ahua said, “My people are on it. We’ll find them. All of them.”
Not being a trained FBI agent, Joe now felt a little useless. And he was also acutely aware that Ahua’s people were having trouble finding Stacy, so he couldn’t count on them to find his wife any more easily. He knew he was supposed to get out of the way and let Ahua’s people search for Faye, but no. That wasn’t happening. Joe was a natural hunter and he knew Faye’s habits. He needed to be part of this search. More than that, he needed to find his wife.