Back Bay (65 page)

He checked the ammunition clip in his pistol. He had eleven bullets left, and the .45 sounded like a cannon when it went off. He didn’t want to shoot anyone, just scare the hell out of them. He had already killed one man. That was enough.

They gave the railcart a shove and it began to roll down the gentle grade toward Copley Station. Danny and Jack walked beside the cart so that it wouldn’t roll too far too fast.

Peter grabbed Evangeline by the elbow, and she turned to him.
“It may get dangerous tonight. Do you want to wait with Dad up in the truck?”

She frowned. “And leave the boys to have all the fun? I’m going to be the first person to look into that box, Peter. I’ve earned it.”

“I can’t make you turn back?”

In the quiet moments since they had arrived in the tunnel, his excitement had worn off, and he had been able to think clearly. He knew that in a few moments, the action would consume him. “There may be gunfire.”

“You don’t need my help anymore, so you want me out of the way?”

“Whether we make it tonight or not, I want you around tomorrow.”

“I’ll be here if you will.” She spoke calmly, rationally.

Twenty minutes later, Soames and Philip Pratt heard the faint rumbling sound of a drill boring into concrete. They stopped digging. They heard it again.

“The Fallons?” asked Pratt.

“Did you ever expect them to give up?”

Pratt shook his head. “Can they get it first?”

“Not if they’re trying to jackhammer through two feet of concrete.”

The Fallons calculated that, if Abigail Pratt Bentley’s directions were precise, they would find the tea set about fifteen feet outside Copley Station, knee-high on the tunnel wall.

Now, Peter and Danny were drilling fourteen holes in a six-foot circle around the spot they had chosen. When they were finished, they would pack the holes with dynamite. Danny was already figuring how to set the charges. In the middle of the circle, he was drilling three holes. He’d wire those to blow first. That way, the top half of the circle would have a place to collapse into when it blew a millisecond later. The charges in the bottom half of the circle would be the most powerful. They would explode a second after the top half fell, and they would move the rubble away from the wall.

About forty feet down the tunnel, Evangeline was fashioning a
protective barricade from the steel fire doors. A few feet in front of the area where the Fallons were working, Ferguson was setting up the powerful work lights. He was angling them toward the Copley platform and trying to place them so that they would not be knocked over by the blast. There was little conversation.

Everyone had a task. Everyone worked quickly and methodically. Evangeline did not think about the danger. Jack tried not to think about the drink he wanted. Peter was not even thinking about the tea set. He thought of nothing but the process. He felt nothing but the drill spinning in his hands.

At three-thirty, William Rule was asleep in a chaise longue on his balcony. The telephone rang and shook him awake. He spoke briefly, then hung up and called for his butler.

Edward appeared in his shorts. “Yes?”

“Prepare a light breakfast. Mr. Hannaford and I will be eating in an hour.”

Edward went off to dress.

Rule looked out toward the airport and realized that he couldn’t see it. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since he’d nodded off, and the fog was rolling in.

The hole in the seminar room floor was over six feet deep, and dirt was heaped in great piles all about. Pratt and Harrison were digging.

“Stop,” said Soames. He cocked his head like a robin listening for a worm. “They’re not drilling anymore.”

“Could they have made it through?” asked Pratt.

“Not likely.” He wondered if any of them had the training to use explosives. Danny Fallon, the independent contractor. Soames cursed. He should have stopped them when he’d had the chance.

“Do it.” Peter’s voice vibrated with excitement.

Evangeline stuck her fingers in her ears.

Ferguson put his hands on his head.

Danny twisted the crank on the detonator box. An electrical charge streaked down the wires.

Philip Pratt and Geoffrey Harrison were knocked against the side of the hole. Soames staggered. The ground in the hole sank by a foot.

Huge chunks of concrete smashed off Evangeline’s barricade and scattered everywhere. The smoke and dust billowed into Copley Station and rolled down the tunnel. For a moment, Peter Fallon was transfixed by the cloud pulsating toward him. Illuminated from behind by the lights in the station, the smoke looked like some giant sea anemone. As it engulfed him, Peter Fallon leaped to his feet.

“Let’s go, Danny!” He grabbed a shovel and ran toward the hole.

Soames called for Buckley and Dill.

“My niece is down there,” screamed Pratt from the hole.

“Your niece is probably waiting for them in a car someplace down Boylston Street.” Soames snapped the Beretta out of his holster.

Ferguson took out his pint and sneaked one more belt of whiskey. Evangeline began to cough. He offered her the bottle. She shook her head. He started to take another drink, then hesitated. It seemed like a good time to stop. He threw the bottle against the wall.

The dynamite had torn a six-foot hole in the side of the subway wall and had bent reinforcing rods like pieces of plastic. The shock snapped the electrical circuit which fed the fluorescent lights. Except for the emergency lights shining out from Copley Station, the tunnel was in darkness. Water and gas lines running between the street and the tunnel dome had not been damaged. However, groundwater was already seeping through the rubble.

For the Fallons, Evangeline, and Ferguson, the blast had been deafening, and shock waves were rolling all the way back to the tunnel entrance on Huntington Avenue. But Danny believed that the concrete would contain most of the sound twenty-five feet underground. Since Boylston Street was a business section, there were few people on the street or in the buildings above the blast at four in the morning. A security guard in the Public Library might
have heard the noise. A sensitive burglar alarm might have been tripped someplace above them, but that was all part of the gamble. The Fallons knew that in most residential areas of the Back Bay, the blast had been nothing more than a faint jolt, not enough to wake a light sleeper.

Peter and Danny attacked the dirt. Evangeline and Ferguson threw the steel doors onto the railcart and pushed it back down to the new hole in the tunnel wall. Ferguson pulled three doors off the cart and set them up so that the Fallons could dig behind them. Then, he set up a pair for himself. Evangeline couldn’t start the generator. Danny grabbed the wires from her, and she grabbed his shovel.

Soames, Buckley, and Dill broke into the subway and raced down the stairs through the rising dust.

Ferguson saw them when they reached the platform. “Hit it!”

Danny threw a switch on the generator, and four powerful quartz beams cut through the smoke, momentarily blinding Soames and the others.

“Back off,” screamed Ferguson from behind the lights. “Back off and out. We’ve outsmarted you.”

Soames answered by shooting out one of the lights. Dill jumped across the tracks and hid behind a concrete piling.

Ferguson fired wildly down the tunnel. One of his shots caught Henry Dill in the arm. Soames stuck his head around the corner and fired at another light, but the glare was blinding. He missed. Another volley from Ferguson. Buckley leaped across the tracks to Dill and pulled him back behind the cover of the platform. Soames fired into the tunnel again.

Philip Pratt threw down his shovel. He realized that he had surrendered all his authority to Soames. His hands were filthy, his jeans and sneakers black with mud. He had surrendered his dignity as well. He would regain something, even if it meant losing the Golden Eagle.

He jumped out of the hole and told Harrison to follow him.

The steel fire doors had been a good idea. Behind them, Peter, Evangeline, and Danny were pouring themselves into their
shovels. But they didn’t have to dig far. Just a few feet into the earth, Evangeline hit the strongbox, and her shriek echoed up and down the tunnel.

They’d found it, almost exactly where Abigail had predicted.

Soames fired again, then he looked at Buckley, who was trying to stop the bleeding in Dill’s arm. “We’re not paying you to cower behind corners. Get over on the other side of the tracks. We’ll shoot out the lights and go after them.”

“Bullshit.” Buckley drew the word out. “I’ll trail guys, I’ll put the knuckle on guys, I’ll dig holes in the mud. But I don’t see no future in runnin’ down a tunnel into a set of high-beams while some guy is shootin’ at me. And I don’t like shootin’ back too much, either.”

Peter and Danny cleared the dirt from the strongbox, then Evangeline grabbed the handle and pulled. The box didn’t budge. Peter grabbed the handle with her, and together they tore the Golden Eagle out of the ground. Its weight surprised them, and they dropped it into the rubble at their feet. For a moment, no one dared touch it. All four watched it as though they expected it to open itself, as though it had a life of its own.

“We’ve done it,” said Peter finally.

Soames fired and knocked out another light. Ferguson fired back.

“We’ve done it,” repeated Evangeline, in awe.

Peter grabbed one handle, Evangeline the other, and they started to run.

Soames heard the footsteps in the tunnel. He could not see past the work lights, but he knew where they were going. He turned to Buckley again. “You don’t have to do a thing. Just stay here for ten minutes and take pot shots. Both of you. Aim at the ceiling if you want. Just make them think you’re chasing them.”

Dill took out his pistol. “I’ll stay.”

“All right,” said Buckley. “Ten minutes. Pot shots. Nobody gets hurt.”

Soames ran up to the street. Pratt and Harrison were running toward him.

“Get in the car,” Soames commanded.

Pratt had no time to protest.

When they were sure that Ferguson and the others were fleeing, Buckley and Dill ran into the tunnel and turned the work lights around. Then, they began to fire randomly down the tube. Every time they fired, they could see the four figures fall to the tracks, get up, and run farther. Ferguson would return the fire, but Buckley and Dill were now safe behind the steel doors.

Geoffrey Harrison spun the Pratt Industries limousine around and careened down Boylston Street. He was going the wrong way on a one-way street, but at four-fifteen, there was no one else around.

“There he is!” Soames pointed to a pick-up parked on the left side of the street, near a subway ventilator grate.

Before Tom Fallon could react, the Cadillac was bumper-to-bumper with his truck and Soames’s pistol was aimed at his head.

“Get out,” barked Soames.

Tom Fallon climbed out of the truck.

“Against the wall.”

Tom Fallon put his hands against a storefront. Soames smashed him across the back of the head, and he collapsed on the sidewalk.

“You didn’t have to do that,” said Philip Pratt.

“Shut up.” Soames turned to Harrison. “Disable it.”

Harrison opened the hood of the pick-up and pulled out the distributor.

Peter, Evangeline Danny, and Ferguson reached the ventilator opening with the gunfire echoing down the tunnel after them. The opening was a five-by-ten-foot hole in the sidewalk, covered by an iron grate. A metal ladder led to the surface. Peter looked up into the darkness. “Hey, Dad.”

No answer.

“Dad?” Peter looked at the others. “Do we keep running?”

They heard more gunfire traveling down the tube toward them.

“We can run to the next station,” said Evangeline.

“This is where the truck is,” said Danny. Another volley of gunfire. Danny looked behind him. “The Pratts are down there. We can keep runnin’ all night and they’re still gonna chase us. Maybe the old man didn’t hear us. He’s probably asleep.”

Peter climbed the ladder, cautiously raised the little door in the
grate, and poked his head above the surface. When he saw Soames, he was looking down the barrel of a pistol. Fallon tried to duck down, but Harrison grabbed him by the hair and pulled him up.

Fallon tilted his eyes down the ladder to Evangeline and the others. “Keep running.”

“Hand it up,” said Soames.

Ferguson had the .45 in his hand. He wanted to get off a shot, but the spaces in the grate were so small that the bullet would probably ricochet.

“Get out of here,” said Fallon.

Soames wanted no more hesitation. “Miss Carrington, I killed your brother, and I will kill your lover unless that tea set is in my hands in ten seconds.”

Philip Pratt was stunned. So was Evangeline. Jack Ferguson had guessed it was something like this. Evangeline tugged on the strongbox. Ferguson had the other handle. For a moment, he didn’t let go. He didn’t think that he could.

“I’m waiting,” Soames’s voice rasped out of him. “This young man has caused me no end of difficulty. I will kill him.”

Pratt advanced on Soames. “You killed my nephew?”

Harrison leveled a pistol at Pratt. “Stay there.”

Evangeline and Ferguson reluctantly handed the strong-box to Fallon, and he climbed out of the hole. Harrison grabbed one handle and told Pratt to take the other. They put the strongbox into the back seat, and Harrison forced Pratt into the car.

“Miss Carrington,” said Soames, “please join us.”

“Stay where you are,” said Fallon.

“I’ll count five, then I’ll kill him, Miss Carrington. You’re doing very well. Don’t make a mistake now.”

Evangeline climbed up to the sidewalk. Soames forced Fallon back down the ladder and slammed the grate.

“Follow at the girl’s peril.” Soames pushed Evangeline into the back seat of the limousine and locked the door.

As Philip Pratt had a moment earlier, she noticed that the lock knobs in the back seat had been removed.

The limousine turned around and headed back down Boylston Street. Fallon, Danny, and Ferguson were up on the sidewalk a second later. The sky was brightening, but a thick fog had rolled
across the city. They could barely see the campanile of the New Old South, just a few hundred yards down the street.