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They ran around to the rear of the vehicle. Hayward held back the crowd while D’Agosta stepped up onto the bumper. Grasping the rack on top of the van, he pulled himself onto the roof.
A man leaped out of the van. “What the hell are you doing?” he cried. “We’ve got a live broadcast in session!”
“NYPD Homicide,” said Hayward, positioning herself between him and the bumper.
D’Agosta steadied himself on top of the van, legs apart. Then he raised the axe above his head again.
“Hey! You can’t do that!”
“Watch me.” With one tremendous swing, D’Agosta struck through the metal posts supporting the satellite dish, popping the bolts and sending them flying. Then he swung the flat end of the axe against the dish: once, twice. With a creaking groan of metal, it toppled over the edge of the roof and crashed to the street below.
“Are you crazy-?” the technician began.
Ignoring him, D’Agosta leaped off, tossed the axe aside, and he and Hayward shoved their way through the fringes of the crowd, heading for the subway entrance.
Dimly, D’Agosta was aware it was Laura Hayward at his side: his own Laura, who’d had him escorted out of her office just days before. He thought he had lost her irretrievably-and yet, she had sought him out.
She had sought him out. It was a delicious thought. He reminded himself to return to it if he survived the rest of the night.
Reaching the entrance to the subway, they ran down the stairs and sprinted over to the ticket booth. Hayward flashed her shield at the woman inside.
“Captain Hayward, NYPD Homicide. There’s a situation in the museum and we need to clear this station. Call Transit Authority HQ and have them flag the station as a skip until further notice. I don’t want any trains stopping. Understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
They jumped the turnstiles, ran down the corridor, and entered the station proper. It was still early-not yet nine-and there were several dozen people waiting for the train. Hayward trotted along the platform, and D’Agosta followed. At the far end, a corridor branched off, with a large tiled sign above:
New York Museum of Natural History
Walkway to Entrance
Open During Museum Hours Only
An accordion grille of dingy, rusted metal sealed off the corridor, secured with a massive padlock.
“Better talk to those people,” murmured Hayward, pulling out her gun and pointing it at the lock.
D’Agosta nodded. He walked back along the platform, waving his shield. “NYPD! Clear the station! Everybody out!”
People looked over at him disinterestedly.
“Out! Police action, clear the station!”
The sound of two gunshots thundered down the platform, waking everyone up. They began to move back toward the exits, suddenly alarmed, and amidst the confused hubbub of the increasingly rapid retreat D’Agosta heard the words terrorist and bomb drifting toward him.
“I want everyone to leave in a calm and orderly fashion!” he called after them.
A third ripping gunshot cleared the station completely. D’Agosta ran back to find Hayward wrestling with the grille. He helped push it back and together they ducked through.
Ahead of them, the corridor stretched for a hundred yards before taking a sharp turn toward the museum’s subway entrance. Tilework along the walls showed images of mammal and dinosaur skeletons, and there were framed posters a
“That’s the tomb,” said Hayward, pointing at the map. “And there’s the subway tu
D’Agosta squatted, examined the plat. “I don’t see any exact measurements on the subway side.”
“There aren’t any. They only surveyed the tomb, estimating the rest.”
D’Agosta frowned. “The scale is ten feet to the inch. That doesn’t give us much precision.”
“No.”
She consulted the map a moment longer, then, gathering it up, she paced off about a hundred feet down the corridor before stopping again. “My best guess is that this is the thin spot, right here.”
The rumble of a subway car began to fill the air, followed by a roar as it passed the station without stopping, the noise quickly fading.
“You’ve been in the tomb?” said D’Agosta.
“Vi
“And you can hear the subway in there?”
“All the time. They couldn’t get rid of it.”
D’Agosta pressed his ear to the tiled wall. “If they can hear out, we should be able to hear in.”
“They’d have to be making a lot of noise in there.”
He straightened up, looked at Hayward. “They are.”
Then he pressed his ear to the wall again.
Chapter 63
From his hiding place in the dim doorway, Smithback watched the murmuring, complaining crowds being ushered out of the hall toward the elevators. He lingered a few minutes after the last had passed by, then crept forward, ducked under the velvet rope, and inched along the wall to the corner, where he could peer into the Egyptian Hall. It wasn’t difficult to stay hidden: the only light came from the hundreds of candles still flickering in the hall, leaving much of the antechamber in darkness.
Pressed into the shadows beside the entrance, he watched a small knot of people emerge from the side door leading to the control room. He recognized Manetti, in his usual ugly brown suit, sporting an impressive comb-over. The rest were museum guards except for one man who, in particular, attracted his attention. He was tall and brown-haired, wearing a white turtleneck and slacks. Although his face was turned away, a large bandage was clearly visible on one cheek. What attracted Smithback’s attention wasn’t so much the man’s appearance as the way he moved: so smoothly and gracefully it seemed almost feline. It reminded him of someone…
He watched as the man strode to a huge silver cauldron of crushed ice. Dozens of champagne bottles had been pressed into the ice, their snouts pointing upward.
“Help me get rid of these bottles,” Smithback heard the man say to Manetti-and the instant he spoke, Smithback recognized that honeyed voice.
Special Agent Pendergast. Out of prison? What’s he doing here? He felt a sudden thrill of excitement and surprise: here was the man whose name he’d been working to clear, walking around as casually as if he owned the place. But along with the excitement came a sudden sinking feeling-in his experience, Pendergast appeared only when the shit was really hitting the fan.
Two of the guards jogged up to the tomb entrance, and Smithback watched as they made an attempt to lever open the doors with a wrecking bar and a sledgehammer, without success.
Smithback felt the sinking feeling increase. People were trapped inside the tomb-he knew that-but why this sudden desperate effort to get them out? Was something going wrong inside?
His blood ran cold with speculation. Fact was, the tomb presented a perfect opportunity to launch a terrorist attack. An incredible concentration of money, power, and influence was inside: dozens of political bigwigs, along with an elite slice of the country’s corporate, legal, and scientific leadership-not to mention everybody of importance at the museum itself.
He returned his attention to Pendergast, who was pulling the bottles of champagne out of the ice and hurling them into a trash can. In another moment, he’d emptied the cauldron, leaving only a heap of crushed and melting ice. Now he stepped to an adjoining food table and, with a great sweep of his hand, cleared it of its contents, sending platters of oysters, mounds of caviar, cheeses, prosciutto, and breads crashing to the floor. Aghast, Smithback watched a massive Brie roll like a white wheel all the way across the hall before coming to a gluey rest in a dark corner.