Bad blood

I shivered at the thought of the weight of an entire city pressing down upon me. There was nowhere for me to look but straight ahead, at the point of Golden’s nose.

“You’re not cold, are you?” he asked.

“Just a bit.”

“People always think it’s go

“Three hundred feet,” the man at the controls said, and I knew we were halfway through the four-minute ride to the bottom, the Alimak creaking as we seemed to hurtle on our descent into the darkness.

“So what do the guys do for fresh air?” Mike asked.

“Fresh isn’t exactly the operative word. But air is pumped in all the time by fans, and then the stale air is pumped out through ventilation pipes. Got to be tested constantly for toxic gases and stuff like that.”

Gases. Check. Something else to add to the short list of ways I hadn’t thought about to die in this water tu

“The ones that can’t take it,” Golden went on, “they just blanch before they’re out of this cage. Turn green, some of them, on the ride. Like a kid on his first crack at the giant roller coaster. Get all queasy inside.”

Queasy would have been a good feeling. I was nauseous at this point, clinging to Mercer’s hand as the cage seemed to bounce against the wall and vibrate.

“Four hundred feet.”

“Think about it,” George said. “You go up to see that fabulous view from the Rainbow Room, over at Rockefeller Center. You can look up the Hudson and practically touch Canada from there. Another minute and you’ll be farther in the ground than that skyscraper reaches into the sky.”

Smoke and dust, the residue from last night’s explosion, were still heavy in the air. I covered my mouth and coughed, hoping not to be sick in the crowded elevator.

Golden reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out several small plastic bags-the kind used to store sandwiches or food-with something folded inside each. “You might want a mask,” he said to us, holding out his arm. “The fire will make it tougher to breathe today.”

In another bag he had a package of cough drops, which he offered to me. “Everything has to come down here in plastic-the guys’ lunch, their cigarettes, their identification. The constant dripping gets to everything-and everybody.”

“Five hundred feet.”

The droplets had turned into ru

I was willing myself to stay on my feet, thinking of the beautiful June day that was awaiting me on my return to the surface. As we neared the end of the descent, the artificial light source below us cast an eerie glow against the scarlet mesh of the Alimak.

The operator cranked back the lever to bring us to a stop, blowing a shrill whistle to clear the landing platform and a

Golden reached back and unlatched the door, stepping out onto the top of a wooden staircase that led down to the floor of the shaft, six hundred feet below midtown Manhattan.

“Welcome to the center of the earth,” he said, as Mike followed him out and started down the steps. Golden ran his hand across the wet surface of the wall as he walked. “Nobody but the sandhogs-and you investigators-will ever see this-this bedrock, this tu

Mercer kept hold of my hand and led me out behind him. I stopped to look up toward the top of the hole-the great void to the side of the Alimak-trying to discern the source of a terrible clanging noise over my head.

“You okay?” he asked me, trying to disengage from my grasp. “C’mon, Alex. Let’s keep up. I promise to get you back up there in one piece.”

I grabbed the banister, reluctant to take the first step off the wooden platform, struggling to keep from walking out of my borrowed boots.

Golden was pointing out the tu

“Hurry up,” Mercer said, coming back up toward me and stretching out an arm to coax me down.

Then I saw the expression on his face as he screamed at me to duck.

I leaned over, my hard hat crashing down the steps, falling into the mudpile at the bottom. Behind me, a lethal metal spear-a tire iron that had fallen, or been dropped, from street level at the mouth of the hole-landed inches from my back and impaled itself into the wooden floorboard.

13

“Get her out of the way!” Golden ordered.

I straightened up and plodded into the mud as fast as I could move away from the shaft at the bottom of the hole.

“What the fuck was that?” Mike yelled at him. “Bring that Alimak back-I’m going up. The damn thing nearly killed her.”

“Nobody could have seen Alex from up on top. It must have been-”

“Don’t give me that crap,” Mike said, wrapping the end of the metal weapon in his handkerchief. “Somebody was sending a very clear message. You were the last guy to step on and the first one off, so whoever was watching knew you wouldn’t be the target. I’m guessing this was meant for one of us.”

My heart was speeding again, the beat as loud to me as the tire iron had sounded as it had bounced off the rock walls. Mike was going nose to nose with Golden.

“You stay and get this done,” Mercer said, separating the two men. “I’ll check out who’s up there.”

“I’ll go with you. Let me get the cab back down,” Golden said, heading for the control booth at the head of the staircase. He pointed into the tu

I squinted into the long black tube that stretched out in front of us-laid with train tracks as far ahead as I could see-and then made out Teddy’s hulk emerging from the haze about twenty feet away.

“Step lively, Alex,” he said. “Last guy we lost had a bad habit of lingering near the Alimak door. Spring thaw came along and an icicle broke off in the shaft above him. Point of it split his head in half, like a watermelon.”

Everything about the operation was dangerous. This was a world shrouded in darkness and mist, the occasional bulb hanging from wire that was taped overhead. The vivid colors of the hard hats and rain slickers were in sharp contrast to the tones of black and gray that dominated the landscape.

“Sorry. I can’t go any faster.”

“You’ve got to watch yourself on these railroad ties,” Teddy said. “It’s nothing but puddles in between.”

“Why the tracks?” Mike asked, each of us trying to lift one foot at a time over the railroad ties, in single file, sinking into the mud as we tried to advance.

“Can you see ahead?”

We both looked up into the shadowy cylindrical tu

“Yeah,” Mike said.

“This leg will go nine miles to the south of us,” Teddy said. “It’ll co

Mike turned to check on my progress. He looked over my head. “And behind us? What’s that?”

“The other half of the tu

More than twenty treacherous miles of cavernous tentacles and only one way to get back out to Thirtieth Street. I looked down again as frigid water sloshed over the top of my boots.